Everloving

Okay so let one thing be clear. I have a mission in life. A passion and a purpose. A power. A territory I want to get into. An energy.

It is to be a software engineer in the renewable energy sector and that is my mission in life. It is my passion in life. 

It is my power and my purpose. That is what I was born to do and am here on this earth to do. Will it change or not? I don't know. I think not. But it may expand. But there is a clear glitch. 

Not a really glitch. A challenge. An obstacle. An opportunity.

On Becoming a Better Software Engineer

On one thing, let us be clear. Software engineering is my passion. I was born to do this. I am meant to do this. I have a natural aptitude for this. My brain is built for this. I was designed to code.

I don't doubt this at all. But I have a colossal amount of things to learn. It's quite simply enormous. No amount of passion or talent can make up for the need to do hard work (unfortunately...). Nothing can change the fact that I started coding at 28 - and I will probably need to spend at least the next 10 years of my life or so upskilling (if not more).

And so, why am I saying this?

And so that is why I say that... In this journey to combining my two passions, renewable energy and software engineering, 80-90% of my work has to be done on upskilling as a software engineer. On improving as a software engineer. Why? Because - okay, oh well maybe I am exaggerating this a little bit, but still - I know renewable energy. 

I have two sustainability MSc's. I have worked in renewable energy for 2.5 years. I have the soft skills needed to pick up renewable energy knowledge - I can pick up articles and read pieces and analyse them. (However I do want to actually read those pieces - and especially for now starting out I am focusing on reading pieces that link renewable energy to software engineering explicitly). 

It's just that software engineering is a whole new game. It is a whole other kettle of fish. It is so hard and there is so much to learn. And so I just need to remember: when I am upskilling as a software engineer in my day job that is 80-90% of the work. And that is already so much. And the other 10-20% of the work towards my life mission can be done in two things:

• Researching the intersection between renwable energy and software engineering, and
• Researching renewable energy but always trying to apply it in a software engineering context.

Everloving

"Everloving" is a song by Moby and I am absolutely in love with it. It embodies the love that I feel, for the whole wide world, so well. I would like to summarise what I have learned in the last 3 blog posts. Even though the weekend is here.

Everloving: Summarising what I have learned so far on this journey of passion and love

I started writing my renewable energy X software engineering blog posts less than one week ago! So here goes.

I will always love this forever

So here is a summary of what I've learned so far:

• The industry is lacking in people who are experts in both of these things: 
• Both software engineering and renewable energy
• If the industry is going to make the renewable energy transition that it needs, then we will need those who are experts enough to understand it.
• I have a long way to go in both of these domains and I especially have a long way to go in terms of software engineering. Renewable energy knowledge can be gained through doing research, reading articles, etc. Software engineering is a valuable skill which is almost impossible to learn. So here I am learning it now. And researching the intersection between the two is really only a way of adding to my journey.

That's on a personal note. But then what are the more industry-specific, generic things that I've learned?

Software vs. hardware - nowadays, software will make a bigger difference than hardware. Software requires no new physical materials, and is cheaper to build. It is also the only thing that is fast enough to keep up with today's shifting demands in energy - and hardware is getting more and more expensive to build. Computing power is getting cheaper too.

A lot of the innovation in the energy industry is happening at the scale of the home. 

Integrating this information into the energy grid - and as a professional, I can easily say, creating the applications for users to easily, comfortably and happily manage the energy systems in their home - is no easy task and it is a task that will require good software. And that is where professionals with expertise in both areas come in.

A part of the big changes that are happening at the home energy level are the introduction of DERs, or Distributed Energy Resources. I think this means home energy stuff, like solar panels, home mini wind turbines, and etc. - anything that is located "on the customer's side of the meter". Helping people to manage these things is part of my job and hopefully will become increasingly so in the future.

And integrating this stuff into the grid - integrating this information into supply and demand analytics and stuff - is a big part of the software of the future.