Author: Nico

Or, write software as if you really cannot afford a software crash.

I have been watching numerous space exploration missions with interest and it is amazing the abilities we can give these spacecraft with proper engineering principles. It also made me ask some questions. Why does it seem like the software in those spacecraft runs so flawlessly? What is different in the companies that design these space vehicles compared to a company that runs an online shop?

The IT industry currently has a non-standardised convention to denote the skill levels of software developers. Even the term ‘software developer’ does not say anything about a person’s skill set. Some software developers write code only, whereas others create and design the complete software system, and in a few cases the software developer will even be architecting the system on a cloud-based provider like AWS. But that is not all, there is still the whole junior/mid/senior levels to make sense of. And it is us, the developers, who assign, or at least push for these titles, ourselves.