9 Things I Learned as a Software Engineer

Manuel Ebert:

Three years ago I was working in a neuroscience lab in Barcelona, busy putting electrodes on people and teaching classes on cognitive systems. Today I design and write software for a living.

Of course back in science I wrote a lot of software — if you want to make any sense of 40 GB of brain scan data you’ll have to roll up your sleeves and write scripts to crunch those numbers, and I was always a good programmer. But it wasn’t until I quit my job (and possibly my future) in academia and started working for a small and ambitious start-up that I understood what being a software engineer — and more importantly, being in the business of software engineering — is really about. It’s not knowing more programming languages, libraries, algorithms, and design patterns. It’s a mindset.