A software engineer career started for me in 2001 when I joined a tiny start-up company as a junior developer. Since then I was working in different companies and different roles. There is one thing that is still every time magical and makes me feel like a kid.

It didn’t change over all these years and it’s a feeling of excitement of making things real. Those things that you sketch on a whiteboard, discuss with colleagues or friends, implement and re-implement in the code, and then finally see them happening.

Let me share a story that happened recently.

This time I was working together with @driv3r on a project that connects multiple apps (including a third-party one). After a couple of weeks of planning, collecting requirements, communicating with other teams involved, changing existing code, and creating a new app, everything was ready for the first test run. Of course, all components of the project were tested individually, but it isn’t the same as to turn on the whole thing and see if it works as expected.

The third-party app was supposed to make the initial request to one of our API endpoints and that should be triggering a few interactions between other apps, and at some point, the third party should be getting a request back from our system.

Everything is deployed and waiting for that initial request. Click a button in the third-party app. A couple of messages between our internal apps. And 2-3 seconds later the third party receives a call back from our system. EVERYTHING WORKS!

It’s exciting to see how everything works exactly as planned! It doesn’t matter if you are 99% sure that everything should just work anyway (because you’ve spent time checking every component and connection). It doesn’t matter if the project is big or small.

It’s always exciting to see how the results of your work become alive!

From the outside it looks like this:

That’s the moment when you feel yourself as a kid, and it’s amazing.

Keep making things and be excited about them becoming real! 😄