This time one year ago, I was still coming to terms with living a life where I didn't freak out every time my phone rang, worked normal hours and no longer worked in a factory. I had just moved back to Cape Town and almost 2 years of long distance for Frosty and I had just come to an end.
I was just into my second month of my first job that my dad asked me what I did for my new company and at that stage I didn't really know, so I wrote a post on what I did at my factory job. Since I've just completed my first year with my current company, I thought that now would be the ideal time to share what my current job entails.
I am now a project engineer (well, that's what I call myself) and part of a project team with a few other members, which means that I get to deal with clients and develop software for them that will suit their particular operations requirements. In order to give you a vague idea of the industry I'm involved in, we develop software, mainly for factory environments, that replaces paper based record keeping with computer-based record keeping. The software helps to facilitate shift handovers, allows users to generate reports for those handovers and reports for other relevant operations information relevant to everyone from CEO level down to plant operator level.
On a day-to-day basis you will find me involved in some or all of the following:
- Keeping track of our project plan and status and other project management activities.
- In meetings (most of them calls) talking to our clients trying to understand their requirements for a certain piece of work.
- Configuring our "base" software to fit in with needs specific to our clients.
- Designing reports as specified by our clients.
- On Google, trying to figure out SQL queries*, python** syntax or some other thing related to coding that I still have to learn about.
- Sending e-mails responding to queries, following up on requested information and generally "adminny" stuff.
- Organising monthly staff socials (the fun part of my job).
- Deploying bug or client fixes to client servers in order to make sure that their software is running smoothly.
- Putting together test plans, to make sure that our software works as specified.
- Every now and then, I also have the opportunity to travel, such as when I went to Italy for work (you can read about it here and here, and for the more "travel-like" posts on italy here, here and here).
I have to say that I really am enjoying my current job a lot more than my old job. I miss working with code that let me see a physical change in the factory (i.e. making a small change to a line of code could stop a tank from overfilling and overflowing). But getting to work normal hours, have weekends and be close to Frosty mean that I'm much happier overall, so it has definitely been a worthwhile change! Plus, I still get to be involved with factories without having to worry about the day-to-day issues that are involved with running a factory!
* SQL is a programming language that allows you to get a lot of information out of a database quickly
** python is a programming language, and the main language that my company uses.
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