Half my life ago, I graduated with a “magister inżynier” degree after 5 years of studies.
EN/US terminology
How to translate this “magister inżynier” into English? Well, it depends where you ask. In some places, it would be “Master of Science”, others will say that it was “Master of Engineering”. But does it matter? Not for me.
I studied “automation and robotics” at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Białystok University of Technology. And specialised in the “Information Systems”:
After studies
After graduating, I worked as:
- PHP programmer
- Linux/Windows C++ programmer
- Build Engineer
- Software Engineer
Different jobs used different titles.
PHP programmer
In retrospect, those were weird years. The salary was low, the job was mostly boring, but the co-workers were nice. I learned that I did not want to deal with clients, that SCM (Source Code Management) matters and how to make people angry (and how to deal with it).
On 1st February 2007 I officially forgot all my PHP knowledge. The day after my last day at work as a PHP programmer.
Linux/Windows C++ programmer
This was a short job. The company specialised in set-top boxes and digital broadcast software. The team I joined was writing software for both the server side (Linux) and the client side (MS Windows). I worked there for four months. And learnt that Windows programming is definitely not my skill. And that up-to-date documentation matters — my first few days were spent reading the official documentation and crossing out or marking every single outdated part.
I also learnt that “fuchsia” is a colour (it was one of the basic colours in MS Windows). For the curious ones: Fuchsia is their name for Magenta.
Build/Software Engineer
In September 2006 I created my own, one-person company called “HaeRWu”. It is the Polish pronunciation of my “Hrw” nickname. IPA: /hʌ eə vʊ/ or /xa ɛə vuː/.
At first, it was a side job. But it also showed that there is far better money to be made in the Embedded Linux area. So a few months later, I became Build Engineer — a contractor. To OpenedHand, Intel, Vernier, BugLabs, ST Ericsson, Canonical, and several others.
The irony of it all
During all those years, I used to say that I do not work at things related to what I studied. But in reality, I did.
It was not “automation” (unless we count Buildbot, Jenkins, and other CI/CD systems I worked with).
It was not “robotics” but several robots use OpenEmbedded/Yocto derived operating systems. And for quite a while, I was one of top contributors to those projects.
But it was definitely “information systems”. As this name is so generic that almost everything I did fits.