"AWS Amplify build costs $0.01 per build minute".
This is the first time I am writing a blog of any type. I hope to make incremental improvements every week that will reflect in my future work.
This is my first blog of any kind. The plan is to make incremental improvements every week and hopefully that will reflect in my future writing.
As a Mechanical Engineering graduate with 4 years in aerospace, life was good. I was leading projects, talking directly with customers and managing team billing by my third year. The turning point was an Excel VBA tool used for automating calculations and reports. I was given the password to debug it and hunting down crashes and unrecoverable files gave me a genuine interest in programming. I wanted to automate things properly.
At 4 YOE as a Senior Stress Engineer, I decided to switch to software. It's easier to make that jump at 4 years than at 6, so I took the leap.
I had some background in C and MATLAB, but enrolled in a full-stack course to get closer to industry standards. On the side I picked up Node.js, PostgreSQL and Docker. The best thing I learned outside the course was Data Structures and Algorithms - time and space complexity, problem solving in C. I use these regularly in front-end work and would have deep regret if I'd missed them.
I joined HireHunch, an early-stage startup, as a front-end engineer. From day one I owned my tasks. Within six months the complexity doubled and my sleep halved, but I became 10x the engineer I was when I joined. When my senior left, I took over everything - code, deployments, pipelines, AWS. The projects have only gotten more complex since.
Was switching worth it? Yes.
When I was doing structural calculations, I thought about automation constantly but couldn't act on it. Now I can. One day I hope to bring that back and make the mechanical and mechatronics fields more efficient.