When I originally sat down to write this blog, as it is my first post, I started thinking about when I started at gap…wait, that's how Caitlin started her blog post.
Crap.
Ok, let's try this again.
Through the years, one of the questions that has always stuck with me is: What do you REALLY do all day?
I find it funny to know that my co-workers, friends and even family have a hard time trying to understand what it is that I do all day. I'm the Development Manager here at gap intelligence, but no one outside of my department really seems to know what that means. For that matter, a lot of people don't really know what our computer programmers do, but the conversations about it can be a little awkward:
- Yes, I can build a website
- No, I can't build your website, pay for your domain name and hosting, and update it on a daily basis for free
- Yes, I know my way around a computer
- No, I can't come over to your house to clean your malware-ridden computer, caused by you downloading a bejeweled executable from a shady website after you clicked on that random popup (sorry Mom)
- Yes, I can understand what all those lines of code mean (most of them)
- No, I can't read binary falling down the screen and see people walking across it (if you don't know what this means, please stop reading and go watch The Matrix. RIGHT. NOW.)
From: familygeeks.com
I guess you could say that as software developers we think of ourselves as pretty cool and creative, but really, we're just trying not to burn the office down.
In all seriousness though, at gap intelligence, we have an awesome dev team comprised of rockstar developers located in San Diego, Canada and Uzbekistan. And we are all able to work in harmony thanks to an amazing Project Manager that keeps us all in check.
We keep busy all day by fixing and improving our existing software solutions as well as working on new solutions to help make our co-workers' and customers' lives easier.
We are constantly coming up with new ideas that can benefit our co-workers and the company as a whole. We work days, nights and weekends if needed, while still making sure to enjoy life outside of the office. We follow software development best practices: Agile Methodologies/Scrum, Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration and Monthly Dev Days. We use great tools that help make our lives easier: Slack, Pivotal Tracker, Codeship and Cloud 66. We are united and always looking out for each other professionally and personally.
Speaking of personally, have I mentioned that we have a team of great people? Yes, software developers are people too. We're single, we're dating, we're married, we have kids. We play ping pong, volleyball, soccer. We do hot yoga. Sometimes. We are passionate about what we do and about life in general. In other words, we're probably much cooler than the nerds you imagine when you think of the sterotype you've seen in the movies.
I could go on and on, and probably will in future blog posts where I will explain in more detail the inner workings of what we do and how we do it.
For now though, I hope I've been able to give you a glimpse into what the gap intelligence dev team does on a day-to-day basis.
But in case it's still not clear: what do we REALLY do all day?
It's simple. We solve problems.
