Thoughts about software development

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...

Recently I've had the opportunity to work with cloud environments. Cloud environments bring benefits but also some new issues or challenges that have to be taken into account. Benefits One of the greatest benefits of cloud environments is the scalability i.e. with a single command one instance can be spawned to two, three or twenty instances that are behind some load balancer service of the cloud provider appearing as a single instance to the outside world. With the simplicity that cloud environments provide the developers can start deploying software as soon as there's something to deploy and keep deploying all the time. In the best case scenario test and production environments can be up and running since day one. Some services also provide a nice feature of roll backing quickly to previous versions if the latest version has introduced a bug that didn't exist previously. Challenges As a developer I've set up various development and testing environments but...

I've been working as a part of international team for about six months now. By international team I don't mean that the team is located in two or more locations but that the team consists of people of different nationalities and therefore different languages. I thought I'd write down my thoughts on how that's working out. The team  About half of the team are from Finland and half from India. As the mother tongue of the team members varies the teams common language is english and it works out just fine most of the time. The language barrier does bring it's own challenges, here's a few that I have noticed or been informed of. Challenge with conversations Mostly out team struggles when it comes to ad-hoc conversations on implementation details or architectural decisions when we, the finnish team members, start to talk about it, in finnish, and thus leaving half of the team out of opportunity to join the conversation just because were talking in finnish an...