Forem: Mehmet Aydin Bahadir

Was I a Developer or an Engineer?

Mehmet Aydin Bahadir — Sun, 24 May 2020 13:09:44 +0000

Tl; dr: Title does matter.

Sunlight is something you can not always find in Amsterdam. Therefore, it is valuable. If it is more than 15°C outside (59°F), and there is enough sun out there, you can find the Dutch everywhere in the beautiful parks of Amsterdam. On a day like this, after working hard before lunch, my colleagues and I wanted to combine our lunch break with a beautiful Keizersgracht view. While having a friendly chat with a bunch of smart people, a girl joined our conversation by introducing herself. It turned out she was working in the same building with us. She finished her introduction by asking the question: “What do you do, guys?”

“Oh, we are Software Developers and working at . . .” I got a “hey, hey, hey” here.

“We are engineers, aren't we?”

“Does that matter?”

Indeed, I was wrong. He had a point, and it does matter.

‌For me, with all my respect, I couldn't see much difference between a S‌oftware Developer and Software Engineer. However, the meridian salary gap between those two titles (based on the information who call themselves as that) does not say the same. According to Glassdoor, it is 25K for the US. A beautiful BMW can fit into this gap, right? So, of course, there should be some differences between these roles.

I discussed it a bit with the people who are “Engineer, not Developer.”

Almost all of these people think there should be some theoretic knowledge required of Software Engineers. That makes sense. Indeed, it is a big discipline that covers plenty of problem-solving concepts that are being developed day by day. But without much exception, all of these people also think having a formal education in this field is a must in order to further define yourself as an engineer. However, I’m afraid I have to disagree with that. Even though I studied for a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, I believe universities are not the only place to learn about Software Engineering. There are plenty of resources around, like books and online courses.

Also, education should not be the only thing that matters to be an engineer, right? What practices are unique to engineers as distinct from developers? What makes the difference in real life? Applying software engineering practices, of course, you might say. That was the confusing part for me. Take the design pattern concepts of Software Design field as an example. When I apply them, would people call me an engineer?

That is confusing, indeed, because there is no such concept as Software Developering; instead, we have Software Engineering. And the only concept-specific boundary we can draw is between Programming and Software Engineering. However, this is off-topic.

As far as I got, this part is not as clean as it was with the topic of education, in large part because there is no consensus. However, most people think of engineers as architects. You might think an engineer plans, whereas a developer applies. I am also not sure how this works in real life. I see a lot of people calling themselves Software Architect (not Software Engineer) and Glassdoor puts an extra BMW for this role. Let’s say this is a wrong assumption.

Another thing I heard often is that a software engineer is a jack of all trades, whereas a software developer has proficiency in a single programming language. Well, this might be something, but being able to code in different languages also sounds fallacious. Of course, it is good to know some pros and cons of different coding languages, but what is the benefit of having lots of engineers in your company if they are not good enough as developers to write code in a language you choose?

Personally, I still can’t see a clean line between developers and engineers. However, people I talked with helped me make some progress in understanding the differences between these two titles. With their help, I will start calling myself an engineer rather than a developer since that better fits my professional responsibilities. Still, again, the difference is not crystal clear to me.

So, what do you think about the differences between a developer and an engineer?

PS: You can read Software Engineering at Google to understand the distinction between Programming and Software Engineering.

"Is PHP Dead?" Discussion

Mehmet Aydin Bahadir — Sun, 10 May 2020 09:54:41 +0000

Tl;dr: it is not.

It was an important moment for me. I was turning 30. One of my best friends organized a lovely house party, and another DJ friend was playing nice music. Even my brother, who was living in Turkey, flew 3000 kilometers and caught the event at the last moment. There were some people that I knew but also some people I barely knew. One of these guys from the second category, who was working in a big IT company, asked me that famous question with a loud voice so I could hear him.

“So you're coding in PHP, is it not dead yet?”

He was sipping his cocktail and made that face with a big grin, which I see on most of the people who asked the same question to me. Yes, writing PHP is a part of my job, but as a software engineer (some call me a developer, but this is another discussion), it’s not the only thing I do. If there could be a chance for me to describe myself, instead of answering the “oh, which language are you working on for server-side programming?” question, I would love to talk about problems I solve, decisions I make, and the architectural reasons behind them.

But yes, I was (and still am) coding in PHP.

And there is a simple reason behind that. It is not just because PHP has the best tools for me, or because I love to write in PHP. But it is because someone else already made this decision ages before me. Yes, in today’s world, people at Booking.com are still writing in PERL, and that does not make them bad developers. The same argument is valid for developers who work for Facebook. Most of the successful companies around the world interview candidates without asking language-specific questions. They mostly focus on the algorithmic intelligence of their potential colleagues without being worried about their language backgrounds. That said, I don’t personally know anyone who only codes in PHP. Still, I am not sure if this is the perfect world that we are living in, but most of the developers I personally know are busy using different languages every day.

Then why is this question still coming up, as Jeffrey mentioned in his tweet here?

Jeffrey Way

@jeffrey_way

Isn't it funny how no one ever asks if <insert *any* language that isn't PHP> is dead? And yet...

w3techs.com/technologies/o…

15:44 PM - 07 May 2020

108 427

I see there are many sins for PHP developers here. However, I do not blame them for this entirely, either. The interesting thing about PHP comes from its nature. Most of the engineers out there did not see PHP as a purely functional language. Indeed, PHP implemented most features of functional programming, but the creators of PHP did not initially build it for this reason. The same thing applies to the argument that PHP is an object-oriented language. Even though the evolution of PHP supplied the required tools to us for good object-oriented design, again, that was not the language’s main goal.

PHP comes with the simplicity of releasing websites. That was the main goal of the language itself, which is mostly forgotten. In today’s world, PHP still runs 78% of the entire internet because of this simplicity.

I’m coming from the simplicity of the language to another simplicity, and that is managing content. Let’s face facts: Wordpress is still the de facto leader of the web. Most content creators use its weird admin interface every single day. Nine out of ten news websites in today’s world draw their strength from this CMS. Honestly, I don’t know how much Wordpress developers earn from their freelance work, but they still do a lot.

And the thing I know, the most important thing, is that content managers don’t know and don’t give a f*ck if the language behind their beautiful admin panel is PHP or not.

I’m coming back to the question and the smile on the face. I can imagine why these smart engineers blame PHP as the source of spaghetti code out there. And let’s get back to the fact that I’m coding in PHP; yes, I do. But believe me, I have no idea what is going on when I look at wp-blog-header.php. A lot has changed in the PHP world over the last ten years, and yes, not surprisingly, you can find elegant code in this world nowadays.

Either way, PHP and Wordpress rule the internet. Let’s respect that and continue to provide solutions to the problems we are dealing with.

Thanks to Jeffrey Way, the reason for this post.