Monday, January 25, 2010

What’s It Take To Be a Senior Developer or Software Leader?

If I were to trumpet my own horn, I would say that I've been building web sites and technology-based human process workflows for the last 13 years. Since I was 19 years old and was using Microsoft FrontPage. At the time my skills were HTML layout, PhotoShop, and CSS. I was mostly a designer. In 1999 I picked up the skill of SQL database development and object-oriented programming. That was a huge leap forward. I was writing server-side scripts in 1999 and did that professionally for about 4 years. Then .NET came out. Then I went back to school and got my Master of Science and MBA in Information Systems. I learned a lot then. In 2002 I learned about and implemented SharePoint and was a CAML developer. I worked with OpenText LiveLink and IDS Scheer ARIS to design enterprise wide SOA and Knowledge Management architecture for Siemens Ultrasound Division. I left there and spent the next few years working with SharePoint Server (MOSS) and did the same: this time for Nordstrom and Microsoft. I became a software development project manager and then started getting back into writing code. The languages of today: C#, SQL Server 2008 (I started on 2000), ASP.NET MVC, SilverLight, JQuery, Drupal, WordPress, and I'm getting into Eclipse.

At any rate, I would say that a senior developer is a person who can:

  • Write code
  • Think of processes and business problems as software systems
  • Can lead software development teams
  • Is highly communicative and understand the software development process
  • Can recruit and is respected by other software developers

Thoughts?

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