Thoughts about software development

I've had my DIY home automation system for controlling outlets and reading sensor data running for about two years now. The system has been working fine and I haven't had any need to touch the code since I added the sensor reading to it, until a few months back. Need for new functionality Few months ago I got a new IoT toy for a lend from a friend until I'd get my own toys, a ruuvitag sensor beacon. Ever since I found the ruuvitag for the first time from kickstarter I had the idea of getting a bunch of ruuvitags and adding their weather station sensor readings as part of my home automation system. The original home automation backend included only tellstick compatible devices and was written in Python, and in my mind it was kind of a hack. The ruuvitag beacons communicate via BLE i.e. Bluetooth Low Energy and that meant that I needed to add functionality to read the beacon data via bluetooth. I found a ruuvitag Python library and initially thought that I'd just...

Have you ever wondered what do software consultants exactly do? I'll share my view of how I ended up as a software consultant, what I have gained and what do I do as a consultant. My brief background I started my career as a programmer in the early years of 2000's as part of my studies and via summer jobs. Back then I was working with web sites and doing... well what ever we could do back then. Few years later I enrolled to university and at some point started working as a programmer to have some side income and work experience. After I graduated I continued working for the same employer I had been been working for the past few years. After four years of working with the same employer and on pretty much the same applications and technologies I started to notice that I wasn't learning new skills or technologies as much and fast as I wanted to. Time for a change I started looking for job openings and had a few interviews with different companies. I chose to work f...