What prompted your transition out of your area of academic study: photonic systems?

[ariya]

A physicist usually has the best interest to learn and understand advanced math, primarily to serve as a tool to solve complex physics problems. In fact, we often see a healthy collaboration between a physicist and their mathematician friend. Most physicists will not turn themselves into a full-time mathematician. However, once a while there will be a physicist who thinks, "Hmm, math is not so bad after all", and then decides to purse a career in the wonderful world of math.

What prompted my transition out of my area of academic study? It started as an experiment. Turned out that it is not so bad after all, so I stick with it.

In my answer to question #2 (When did you start coding?), I mentioned how I got interested in analog/digital micro-electronics when I was still very young. Back then, as I witnessed how digital computers became more powerful every year, I decided that I have to be good as mastering computers, hence the beginning of all side projects related to programming.

Meanwhile, what I studied at school was mostly a good mixture of physics, math, and micro-electronics. Starting with Engineering Physics major during my graduate, I ended up focusing on modern, complex photonics system as my postgraduate research. Throughout this time, I quickly realized that it is important to have a solid foundation in two very important areas: math and software. The former can be a story for some other time. For the latter, I discovered that I could learn all I need to know about software development by reading a lot of books (see #8) and contributing to FOSS projects.

I had some fun with Linux (see #3, What was your best programming moment?). It came with KDE as the desktop environment and thus, I learned about KDE as well. Before I knew, I became a regular KDE contributor, mostly for its office suite. This activity helped me to understand software engineering, despite the fact that I never formally studied Computer Science.

By the time I completed my postgraduate research (curious? read this 8-page paper), I had to make a choice. Should I stay in the academic world based on the research work I have done in the last few years? Or should I leverage my new profound interest and growing knowledge of software development to embrace a career as a software engineer? After a brief soul-searching period, I decided that I needed to experiment with something new because "If this software thing does not work out, I can always go back to university and teach". That was the transition moment.

Through my KDE involvement, I accumulated enough knowledge of Qt so that I could work for its maker, Trolltech. As I wrote in #12 (When did you started coding?), one thing led to another and here I am being comfortable working in the software industry!

[newworldorder]

Thanks for the rich response--lots of insights there.

[ariya]

Thanks for the intriguing question @newworldorder!

[diorahman]

Nice!