Change in Career
This month (June 2018) I started working for Pro Warehouse. One of two Apple Enterprise Resellers in the Netherlands.
When working for this company I get to combine my two areas of expertise:
- Development
- Apple System Engineering
When attending the WWDC'08, ten years ago, I made the conscious move from System Engineering to full-time development. Started as a junior developer in ‘10, and increased my skills as a developer over the past years. I learned a lot and keep on learning every day. I just love the challenges development throws at me.
I noticed that a lot of times developers accept, in some form, to do repetitive work. Whether it is about creating the release builds or testing their work. For me that was slightly a strange experience, I spent the better part of 25 years automating the shit out every thing I could think of. We as humans are not made to do repetitive work. Let a computer do that, that platform excels in doing repetitive work.
In the past years I always seem to become the guy responsible for the Continuous Integration Server, however it always was something to do on the side. Which is a shame, since when done properly, setting up and maintaining an CI/CD server is not something to do on the side. It is an equal part of work that needs to be done in a professional Development team. Sadly a lot of times management did not realize the importance of this part of the development process. Luckily this is changing and more understand and realize the need of such an environment.
When talking to Pro Warehouse I realized that there is a need for people like me, those that understand servers and understand the needs of a developer. So I’m happy that I get to bring my two areas of expertise together. System Engineering on the platform I love and building In-House applications that support the Digital Transformation that is happening in the Enterprise. In effect I turned into a DevOps engineer. One that is specialized in building native platform applications. Wether they are iOS, tvOS, macOS or adding extensions to the Watch.