This post is part of a series interviewing veteran developers, asking them questions about their journey to tech mastery and sharing the advice they have for those getting started.
Today we’re talking to Dawid Ziolkowski. Dawid has 10 years of experience. At the beginning, he worked as a network/system engineer, did DevOps in between, and recently became a cloud-native engineer. He’s worked for an IT outsourcing company, a research institute, telco, a hosting company, and a consultancy company, so he’s gathered a lot of knowledge from different perspectives. Nowadays, he’s helping companies move to cloud and/or redesign their infrastructure for a more cloud-native approach.
If you’re considering a career switch to programming or questioning whether you’re in the right field, Dawid has some great insights for you based on his own experience. Let’s hear what he has to say.
Basic logistics: Stack? How long have you been doing it?
So, the answer to what stack I use is not straightforward. For most of my career, I was a system engineer involved with DevOps. My first programming experience was with Python. As a DevOps engineer, from time to time I had to write smaller or bigger scripts. And the more experience and different jobs I got, the more programming I did.
For a long time, I was able to more or less understand and write small programs/scripts in Python. After a few years, I decided to finally properly learn at least one language. I decided to go for JavaScript. I made that decision partially because I wasn’t really a fan of Python and partially because I wanted to learn a bit of front-end development.
After learning the solid basics of JavaScript, I learned Angular.js and Vue.js. I enjoyed building front ends, so later on decided to learn the back end, too. Now I know Node.js and Ruby. So, for a little bit more than two years now, I think I can call myself a full stack developer.
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