teeang

That's Different to Property Management. Why Software Development?

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That’s Different to Property Management. Why Software Development/Engineering?

My boring answer, is that I’ve always been fairly technical. I am the go-to IT support technician of the family and was one at the first Real Estate office that I worked at.

The more interesting answer, is a combination of a few things:

I had been learning programming since 2014 and was a permanent beginner for some time

Wrote my first line of code back in 2014. Completed a Diploma in Software Development course back in 2015. But I never really put myself out there and I didn’t work hard enough.

So I went from Warehousing, then eventually to Real Estate for a few years.

Throughout this time period, I was learning programming on and off. I would spend a few months programming, then starting and stoping, over and over.

Let’s fast-forward to me as a Property Manager (Real Estate Rentals).

I built something that Dave the Property Manager would pay Dave the Software Developer for

At the end of each month, I had a process that took me five hours. This involved scanning 100+ Landlord Statements, re-naming each file, then emailing them manually, one by one.

Came across SendGrid and built a small application to batch send emails from a spreadsheet.

And I was able to drop this process down to 1 hour.

That’s when it clicked for me. I now understood what makes Software Engineering valuable.

💡 We’re solving the problems of our customers.

To this day, I carry this philosophy as a Software Engineer.

It’s one of those rare careers where you can get paid well and be very passionate about

Paid well vs passion. Most people only get to pick one.¹

With Software Engineering, I get to pick two. That’s a hell yeah from me.

¹ I put that in italics, because I do believe “follow you passion” is generally BS. But that’s a topic for another day. If you are interested in digging deeper, I’ll recommend Cal Newport’s book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”.

And finally, I believed that I would be way stronger as a Software Engineer

Frankly, I felt that I would only ever be a mediorce Property Manager.

As a Software Engineer though, I believed that I could be really good. So good that they can’t ignore me.

I think that has proved to be true so far. I am certaintly heading in that direction.

I went all-in. And I put in the work. And I became a Professional Software Engineer after 1200+ hours in VS Code.

I’m 6 months in. I’m still early-career.

I can see myself:

• going deep as an Individual Contributor (IC).
• going deep as an Engineering Manager (EM).
• building my own startup.
• and even working as a Product Manager.

Where ever I end up, I’m really excited to see what happens.

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