| What drew me to software development was the desire to make things. It's not possible to make software worthy of today's audience without front-end, back-end and release engineering. So if this person is saying "you can't make anything yourself[1]", that would be a sad situation. For me, and I know this is common, my backstory goes like this: HTML -> PC building -> Photoshop -> graphic design -> web design -> CSS -> PHP -> JS & jQuery -> Node.js -> Mongo/Postgres -> Angular -> React -> React Native -> Heroku -> Docker -> Gitlab/CI/tests -> ArangoDB -> Kubernetes -> CDNs and lots more I simply do what I need to do to make stuff. I've made back-end REST+WebSocket frameworks, cross-platform front-end component libraries, database ORMs and query builders, mobile apps published on the App Store, built CI pipelines for test and release, and configured containers, orchestrators and CDNs (which I programmed) for max availability. And I've lead teams in doing all these things. Are my experiences "mythical"? No--but if you set your own standards or definitions when defining something you oppose, you'll often prove yourself right. While I've made route-finding systems and address search services, I honestly don't know some of the algebra about sorting algorithms. I learned as I went; and while I probably need more study and a little more time on new tasks than those who focus on a narrow aspect, I'm eager to do it. In my pursuit of making stuff, what's expressed in this article won't stop me. [1] Of course, nothing is made ourselves, we all rely on open source code, computers and servers. |