My name is  
Jurgens du Toit.
Systems Developer.
Problem Solver.

About Me

Technology and Solving Problems are my passion. I'm a South African that loves my wife, life, and coding.

I'm writing a book!

The Logstash Config Guide

Buy it now on Leanpub

15 April 2010

Why I Code

By Jurgens du Toit

A a student I went to a career psychologist to explore my career needs and drives, and got told that I like solving problems in a creative way. As the son of an engineer and a very artsy mother, that kind of made sense. Seeing as I was already into computers and programming, I chose coding as my problem solving mechanism.

Through the years I learned that I loved, never mind liked, solving problems this way. I wrote a framework, because I saw a lot of unstructured and repetitive code in my projects. I dev’ed What’s up in Melville because I needed information about the area I lived in. I saw Hacker News, and wanted the same site, but for South Africa, so I dev’ed ZA Coders. All (hopefully) creative solutions to problems I faced.

I am now Head of Development at Branded Internet, and I’m still very passionate about solving problems through code. Any dev department at a company whose main aim is not to produce software, is to help the rest of the company to solve their problems through code. Finances needs to regularly generate a certain report, Dev scripts the code, and gives them the link. Support needs to information on an account, Dev scripts the code, and gives them the link.

Sometimes Dev departments will write code to help themselves, but most of the work will be done for other departments. So the Dev department needs to communicate, needs to interact, so that they know which problems to solve to help the other departments do their job.

Development departments exists to help other departments. In other words, it’s not about me.

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