After about 7 years of doing IT and Technical Support, I am now officially making the transition to Software Engineer! It's been a journey to say the least. I feel like I definitely took the long road here, but hey I made it.
For the past four years, I've been working as a Technical Support Engineer at LogicMonitor. Saying that I've learned a lot would be an understatement. This platform touches so many technologies, and as support you have to know how the platform interacts with all these technologies -- I'm talking Cisco, VMware, Juniper, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, NetApp... like I can keep going or just search here. Anyway! In this troubleshooting, I would need to help find and document bugs within our monitoring suite and I guess over time I built a bit of a reputation with the Monitoring team that builds these data collection modules (like in a good way).
So what's even this job? The Monitoring team is responsible for creating suites of modules for collecting metric data. These are like extensible, discrete snippets of code that come together and integrate with those specific technology vendors mentioned. This code is embedded and ran on the Collector, which is a Java application running on a server within a customer's environment. These are mostly written in Groovy or PowerShell. Another important part of this role is working on our internal dev tooling which is mostly written with Python.
When folks say that networking is important for job hunting, I think people sometimes forget about their current employer. I guess assuming they like their employer of course. Be prepared for those opportunities because they may open up unexpectedly, and when they do, you'll be ready.
I'm super excited and ready to start this next chapter of my career!