My path to becoming an Android Engineer
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been an engineer inside.
This is a post that formed the basis of a talk I gave at a codebar event a few months ago to give new engineers who are just starting out insight and inspiration on how to get into the industry.
At the age of 4, I remember I started to develop problem solving skills, primarily by fixing everything using ropes and knots. Everything that seemed loose, or out of place, needed to be tied with a rope and its consequent knot. This hobby used to cause me a bit of trouble, specially when I tried to lock cupboards and doors, and attach chairs to the table.
After being scolded every now and then for things I shouldn’t tie, I started to change my attention to something that wouldn’t involve playing with the house furniture and appliances. That’s then when I started to discover electricity…
Since my father knows about it, he started to teach me the basic stuff: basic laws, what a battery is, a cable, a positive and a negative node, ground, switches, etc. In the beginning, I helped him fixing old batteries for drills and electric screwdrivers, swapping cables, soldering when needed so that I could learn how to remove and add parts.
My knowledge was not very deep, but my imagination did the rest to invent new gadgets just by swapping parts and adding new ones. I spent hours and hours playing around with components.
Once I was playing with my sister and we got two megaphones for kids to talk to each other. After a while I thought what would happen if I disassemble them and I connect the microphone from megaphone 1 into megaphone 2 and vice-versa. My idea was to create a wired walky-talky so that I could talk to her from long distance. I found a 20 meter cable, I unsoldered the microphones to connect them to the opposite megaphone and it worked perfectly.
Years later, my father brought our first computer at home and I was amazed by the fact we could do a lot of things with it, all thanks to electronics. I started to wonder what was under the hood and a kid from school gave me a clue. He was taking programming lessons and apparently he could create programs to run on the computer.
To be honest, I was impressed how could that be possible. I had no idea how could you create a program just by typing something on a text editor on the computer. It really caught my eye.
Since I wasn’t able to join the programming classes, I started to use the computer a lot to know more about programs and understand what you can do with them and I really enjoyed it. My favourite thing was the command line, just executing commands and giving orders to the computer.
When the end of high school was getting close I started to think what I wanted to become, what to study and so on. There were 2 things in my mind, Robotics or Computer Science. Robotics was not available in my hometown university, so I picked Computer Science.
To be honest, I am really happy I picked Computer Science because I really love it. It was a risk for me because I didn’t know much about it, but in the end it is what makes me love my work. I was lucky.
During my University years I couldn’t help discovering new things outside of course lectures and labs. I started to learn web development on my own, since there was no lectures for that. In fact, this new hobby helped me to see the point of what we learnt at lectures and keep developing my skills.
My first project was a personal website made with xhtml, css and javascript. Then I learnt mysql and php and built a website to host a friend’s videos and add comments related to them. Later on, I started playing with Joomla and I got an internship to develop the website for the university environment department, and then I created a website to help students in my city to find a flat or flatmate by posting ads. I also built my family’s company website and my last experience with Joomla was a job at a small local magazine to look after and improve their website. All that in my first 3–4 years of university.
It was in 2010 when iOS and Android phones became popular. At this point, I was still working on web projects but after buying an Android phone I started to feel very interested in developing for such small devices.
After thinking thinking a lot about my future and even though I was only 3–4 months away from graduating and I had a job at the magazine, I decided to resign and invest my time as quickly as possible on mobile apps, so that I could learn more about iOS and Android development just in time for graduation. My idea was to get an internship somewhere to try and see what happened.
In order to accomplish that, I spent all my free time and my savings to buy a MacBook and start taking online courses and tutorials about iOS and Android.
As I learnt I became more and more passionate about it and when I knew the basics I started to create sample apps and showed them around.
Just in time for graduation and after contacting a lot of companies I managed to get an internship in a city very close to my hometown, so just after graduation I moved there and my career as an Android developer started.
At the beginning it was rough, because the money was shitty and every month my expenses were higher than my salary but it helped me to learn quickly and keep on growing professionally.
So… what did I learn?:
Since I started working on Android I’ve realised that I love it more and more everyday and I feel very happy that 5 years ago I decided to change my career and take the risk of something I though it would be an exciting challenge and a future investment.
So, If you feel really passionate about something, don’t be afraid of trying, pushing hard and doing your best to achieve your goal. Also, if you try to do something different to stand out it will help you as well. Because the market is full of great developers and if you build your own career by making decisions, learning and showing what you can do, you will get where you want to go.
