Software Developer

It's a very loud keyboard, but it makes me feel like I'm doing official work.
My name is Chelcie Prasad and I am a developer. The three main things that I do
in my job are building and editing websites, designing websites,
tagging websites so that we can get data from it to see who's been visiting it.
So this is my desk. This is where I do my work every day.
I'm what you call a full stack developer.
That means that I work on both front end and the back end. There's what you see,
which is all the pretty pictures, and that's the front end.
And then you have a back end,
which is the logic and how the website actually runs.
So the back end looks like this. It's a whole bunch of code.
It'll help you go from page to page when you click on a button if something pops
up, that's what that does,
and you need to make the stuff that looks pretty and the stuff that makes it run
kind of work together. The coding here might look quite scary,
but it's not as scary as it seems.
A lot of it is repeated and most of it is given to you through documentation of
whatever project you're working on. I have to design another page for this
website, and so I like to go through a brainstorming process first.
So what I do is I get a massive piece of paper and I fold it and I'll just
brainstorm, um,
4 different kinds of designs just to see like what comes off the top of my
head. I chose this career because I like problem solving,
and this provides me a way to do that as well as I think the creative aspect of
it. When you're done,
you have a sheet of paper that looks like this with 4 very roughly drawn designs.
I'll take pieces that I like from each of the designs and then put it together in one final design.
I initially started off just doing a business degree.
Two years into that, I realized I liked coding and computer science,
so I also picked up a computer science degree and decided to go more fully down that path.
After uni, I had a job being a junior developer,
and then now I'm here being a developer. I think with the industry that I'm in,
everything is constantly changing all the time,
and it's important to not beat yourself up if you feel like you don't know
everything about everything, but nobody does.
Everybody's always constantly learning, and yeah, as long as you know that,
then you should be fine.