David Byrne

There are three primary reasons:

I have always enjoyed software engineering - as an undergrad, I studied C and C++ and caught the bug. As a post-grad, I began using python and since then, continue to use it wherever I can, be it work or personal projects. As a scrum master, I was always interested in what the engineers were doing, often taking the time to understand their work more and at times, contributing.

I miss working on technical challenges - as a physicist, I enjoyed working on difficult problems and creating solutions (often using python).

The time is right - following suit with the recent widespread redundancies / layoffs in the tech. industry in Ireland, my role has been made redundant with my most recent employer. And coincidentally, I had recently started studying computer science in Dublin Business School as a hobby, so I felt it was the right time to make the change.

Physicists regularly use programming as a tool to assist in their research and work, so-much-so that my first coding experience was as an undergraduate student studying Matlab, C, and C++ for numerical analysis. As a masters student, I used python for data analysis and modelling.

As a scrum master, I spent 10 years working very closely with a number of engineering teams across a broad range of projects including industrial automation & IoT, speech technology for education, and most recently in the travel industry connecting travel agents, airlines, hotels, etc. During this time, I became intimately involved in the development lifecycle, from requirements generation to design, from prototyping to full CI/CD pipelined implementations, from dark-releases to global customer releases (and the inevitable outages).

And during that time, I contributed to some software projects directly and built some proprietary applications myself.

After finishing college, I began working in the pharmaceutical industry as a Technical Development Specialist designing and building industrial sensors that could monitor the quality of pharmaceutical product being produced using just light. The company I worked for was small and so as somebody who had some coding experience, I began to work with the engineers, mainly providing technical expertise for the hardware control software they were developing for the sensors I was responsible for. Overtime, as the company evolved, I became the project manager for the development teams, managing all in-house development projects (essentially acting as the PM, PO, Designer, Tester etc.).

While there, I continued to use python to conduct data analysis and later personally developed two customer-facing applications. The first was an automation system developed in python that could be used to control pharmaceutical processes via python scripts and websockets. The second was a desktop application written in PyQT and R that could analyse chemometric data and build predictive models using Partial-Least Squares Regression modelling. These predictive models could be used to monitor the product quality within an active pharmaceutical manufacturing process and in turn, be fed back into the automation system I developed so that the process could be directed to produce the highest quality product.

As time passed and the company evolved to a scale where it became impossible to maintain multiple concurrent roles, I decided to focus on being a scrum master, eventually moving on to other companies.

Having enjoyed being a scrum master for a long time, I miss working hands-on developing software and so have decided to re-focus my career.