hello again this is Richard this is now my seventh day of my blogathon today I'm
going to be talking about what it's like and what it means to be a software
engineer and what it is we need so today's blog post is called I'm a
software engineer understand me and I'll be talking about why this stuff is so
important to us
essentially it's because we're up all night we're up all night because we
need quite we need to better focus quite deeply on what we're doing we need to
better really get quite deeply into our coding our testing we don't need we
really we don't need any interruption we just need to be focused utterly and so
we're up all night we're working for the night quite often because that's the
only time we can do that and ultimately there's quite a conflict between the
various different things we need to be able to do we need to be able to be
quite social we need to be able to collaborate and cooperate and work
together in teams software engineering ultimately is a very social activity and
so during the day we live in open-plan offices we're in meetings we're talking
to each other interrupting each other we're working together closely on
getting stuff done but really that gets in the way of us requiring to
requiring the level of focus
getting the way of us be able to just really get into what we're doing without
the constant context switching without the constant interruptions so we need to
drink lots of coffee because otherwise we'll fall asleep during the day because
it's really the best time really for getting focused and digging deeply into
solving a particular problem is in the dead of the night
so so we're powered by coffee quite often we're up all night coding so
during the day we need to be powered by coffee and this particular software
engineer is also powered by bacon and context switching is quite difficult to
cope with can be hard on you it's quite stressful if you continually swap in
context it can be really quite annoying can really drive you crazy it can get in
the way and it can really slow things down stopping and starting tasks picking
up and putting down tasks really can be very suboptimal it's really to complete
one task before starting another task you it's painful it's stressful it's
damaging to constantly be multitasking do not multitaskers a software engineer
although how can you avoid that it's something which seems to be a reality
of the job really try as hard as you can minimize it it's really quite important
it's important therefore to try and ensure that you sort of defend yourself
from this constant context switching as best as you can and people working with
software engineers need to understand this too they need to understand that you
can't keep bobbing in and out of their focus there they're deeply deeply into
solving a particular problem or deeply deeply and grossed in what they're doing
and you know if you wonder why why did that guy just snap at me well it's
because you just snapped him out of deep focus he's he's in there he's trying to
solve problems for you he's trying to get the job done for you and you keep
jumping in and out of his focus so don't do that also it's a good idea as a
software engineer to make full use of your downtime and I would recommend
coming to the seaside so in summary then software engineers need time and space to
be able to focus and get into their problem-solving space get into there
they're in their heads a lot of the time thinking thinking is they're doing and
that requires concentration but also we've got to understand that as software
engineers we've got to understand that it's all about the actual act of
software engineering is a very social act you've got to deal with a lot of
people you've got to collaborate cooperate work in teams it's all about
teamwork there's no real software projects you know already real worth
involved just one person for you know it's it's teamwork so there's this
strange it's odd with itself really it's deep focus it's individual deep focus
and then there's this social aspect which is quite hard so make sure you get
lots of rest come to the seaside I recommend Scarborough and the lovely
castle over there in the distance okay thank you very much that is day seven
of my blogathon see you again soon bye
