What do Software Engineers do?

By Coding Ninjas

Check out the different career paths that you can take up as a Software Engineer.

Ever visited a website and wondered how within seconds you watched the TV show from the internet that has launched recently or played a round of Angry Bird on your mobile phone and now you just can’t get enough of it? Well on all such occasions you are interacting with a product created by a team software engineers.

Software engineering is a field of computer science, which deals with the development of different software-related products such as a website (e.g. Netflix) or a mobile application (as in our above examples). Gaming and coming up with a streaming service is just not it; a software engineer may be involved at different levels of creation of a myriad of tools and technologies. This may include developing or maintaining an Operating System (like Windows), creating software applications (e.g. Internet Download Manager), or web applications (MakeMyTrip).

What are the different career paths that come under the title ‘Software Engineer’?

Web Developers

Web Developers are the minds behind the plethora of websites we see on the internet. Web Developers are usually further divided into three categories:

Front End Developers

There are multiple roles involved in the creation of a website. First, a designer comes up with a design for a website (i.e. how a website should look like). Those software engineers who take up the idea of how a website should look and write programs to realise the designs are called Front End developers. While design is the way a webpage is ideated to look like, front end development is how the particular design actually gets implemented on the website.

The job of a front-end developer is to weave together the idea of design and the power of technology to bring about a website. Front end developers produce code in form of HTML, JavaScript and CSS. With the help of these technologies, contents of various types such as images, buttons, search-bar, internal links, navigation bar, forms, and payment gateways can be shown on the website.

The idea behind designing a website is that the user gets to see the information for which they entered the site in an easy and memorable format. The fact that today, there are devices with dimensions ranging from few cms to massive inches makes it a considerable challenge for a developer to come up with the code that tackles this variation.

Back End Developers

These developers take care of databases that are used to make the functioning of the website possible. E.g. when you enter your credentials and get into your Facebook account within less than a second, back end developers are behind this, making sure you get quick access to pages specific to you.

The task of a back-end developer is to make sure the website's swift running, i.e. they must keep care that data requested by the user is always available. The back end part of the website could include a database (eg. Information regarding users on Facebook - their name, friends, photos) and a programming language (Python, Ruby, JavaScript) which interacts with the server that contains the databases and hosts the website.

Full Stack Developers 

These are those engineers whose duties encompass both of the above aspects of web development, i.e. the back end and the front end of the website. So, a Full Stack developer is a sort of “Jack of all”, they can work with databases, set up websites on a server and build the front-end of the site as well.

Few Website developers you can follow to keep up with the latest trends: Addy Osmani, Jason Miller, Oleg, Sarah Drasner, Bruce Lawson

Game Developers and Designers

Do you feel curious about how Mario is getting to a new scene every time you run him ahead? Well, that game is a product of a team of game developer and designers. While the game developers create computer programs that make the game possible, the game designer zooms into establishing how the game come to be, i.e. the obstacles the heroes face, how they would attack the enemy, and how they level up gets decided by the designers of the game.

Game dev accounts to know what’s the latest brewing in the industry: PixelProspector, Rami Ismail, Daniel Linssen

Mobile Developers

With the massive influx of smartphone and internet-related technologies, the mobile industry is expanding faster than ever. The biggest drivers of this push are mobile developers. Behind the applications, you see on iOS, and android mobile phones lie the programming genius of a team of mobile developers. These professionals create apps that work across various mobile screen sizes, irrespective of their companies.

The developers specialise in making applications for mobile platforms such as Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS platforms. Each platform usually has its core development environment (e.g. Java for Android, Objective-C for iOS) which is also known as the native environment.

Top Mobile Developers to follow: Eric Meyer, Jake Archibald, Lea Verou

Read More: How to become a Software Engineer

About the Author:

This article is authored by experts at Coding Ninjas.