Most people seem to be intimidated by Information Technology, and more specifically by Software Development. They probably think of it as black magic, but truth to be told, that could not be further from reality.

In a normal conversation, when asked “What do you do?”, and the answer: “I Develop Software” is thrown up, one of these comments immediately follows: “Ah, so you are a nerd then” or “You people are gods to me” or “Oh, I don’t understand anything of what you do” or “You must be so clever, I envy you”. People normally see us as “that bunch of dark characters, that hang around a humid, dark corner, making jokes in binary numbers” or “that bunch of dark characters […] who have special powers”. Most of these statements are not accurate; but yes, there are people who will actually joke in binary numbers: zero to one.

A confession: We are not gods (although sometimes we would like to think we are – especially when it comes to catching the eye of someone we fancy). We are not as clever as many people think, and we are neither nerds nor weirdos – or at least that is what we would like to think!

At the beginning of our careers, we were not brilliant mathematicians or accomplished physicists who had all the secrets of the universe in our hands; in fact, it was quite the opposite. Most of us started studying Information Technology, with a vision of quite a different future, in which robots would do all the work for us, and we would just sit there and tell them what to do in “mastery voices”, while flying in our cars in magnetic-hyper-speed highways. It probably took us less than an hour to find out how wrong we were. That first day at university, in the Software Engineering class, all the fantasies came crashing down. We were assigned to describe tasks so simple and rudimentary that we wondered if we were in the right classroom. “Describe how to catch a bus”… or “how to change a tyre”… or “What do you do as soon as you get up?”… Nothing very futuristic in those examples, very disheartening indeed!

Later on we found out that computers were not magic boxes, and robots were not going to build themselves, no matter how much we might wish for it to happen. We need to tell computers what to do, how to do it and when to do it.

From the moment we are born, we perceive the world through our senses. Our brain collects the information the senses perceive and puts it all together, therefore generating an impression, an image, a concept, an idea. Those are then put together, thus creating a chain of ideas, images, concepts and impressions. That makes a process. As computer programmers, or software developers – call it what you wish – we need to unravel what is behind those processes, which normally are seen as one thing, as a whole; and break them into as many small pieces as possible, so we can translate them later on, into a computer language. Imagine how difficult that is. You have to think in slow motion, and carefully analyse every single little step.

On the other hand, you get to transform a mere idea into something that some people can actually use to make their lives a bit easier. That’s a bit of what Software Development is about; not a dark art, just pure logic.