My Vision of Business and Technology

A pretty huge topic, especially for a company to ask for on a job application. Since I wrote it, here it is!

In the engineering disciplines, constructs have physical characteristics; they are substantive. As software engineers, we are not primarily concerned with the hardware in which our constructs live. We are concerned with the content of their lives. Their relationships and their behavior are governed only by changes in polarity and currents of electricity. As software engineers, we operate in a world of ideas.

Our industry is young, and within such a boundless domain, possibilities for innovation are everywhere. In the future, building trust-based communication channels with our business partners to facilitate collaboration on problem definitions and solutions will be just as important as any technical achievement. As the libraries and languages available for our use change, we must constantly ask ourselves whether we are using the correct set of tools to solve any particular problem. Finally, we must innovate in our own work, providing solutions suitable not only for the circumstances we face today, but also for those we will face tomorrow.

In my personal vision, investing time in open source products and languages is a key idea. We face many challenges as developers, and leveraging a large base of highly talented developers across the globe makes fiscal and technical sense. In addition, agile methodologies, such as Scrum, can help redefine the sometimes troubled relationship between the business and technical world. Scrum encourages needed flexibility on both sides of a contract and facilitates honest communication about timelines and budgets, thus promoting the ultimate goals of the client. It’s my belief that strong projects can be built using these ideas in the marketplace today and can continue to benefit developers, clients, and customers into the future.