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Splice Digital is part of Windsor’s tech community, working on a global level. Their team of 15 developers work on a variety of web and mobile applications.

Bidur Subedi has been with Splice Digital for the last 8 months as a co-op student through the University of Windsor’s Masters of Computer Science program. He works as a software developer, focusing on back-end web development.

Originally from Nepal, he completed his undergraduate degree there in software engineering before coming to Windsor.

We met with Bidur at Splice’s stylish office in Walkerville:

What does an average day look like?

I generally come here at 8:45. We start at 9:00 so I like to come a little bit early, get my coffee and my desk set up. First thing I do is review my tickets for the day and make a plan. Half of my day is spent writing programs and the other half is planning, reviewing my peer’s code, meetings and more coffee.

I use mostly PHP, some Python, little bit of JavaScript. In school, they introduce you to a language and we do a little bit of it. Here, I’ve learned a lot.

 

How did you choose your co-op?

The University gives us a lot of choices, but I preferred staying in Windsor because I like it here. If I’m in Windsor, I can do my co-op and make some progress towards my degree.

Windsor is the only city I’ve lived for this long in Canada. It’s actually very nice because there is a little bit of everything here. It’s got everything I need. The University is awesome and I get to learn a lot. We have a lot of startups here and industries where we can work.

 

What have you learned so far?

The biggest thing I’ve learned here is teamwork.

I knew a little bit about technology before coming here but I realized that in software development, the most important thing is teamwork.

Very few projects are small enough to do on your own. Your teammate has to understand your code and it has to be well documented. Whenever I run into any issues, I have someone to talk to and everyone here is super helpful.

 

How has the workplace been different from University?

In school, you mainly focus on efficiency, like developing an efficient program. You learn less about planning. Over here, we do a lot of planning and figuring out what needs to be done. While writing the code, it’s not all about efficiency, it’s about readability. Your team members need to read your code and understand it and they can build on it.

 

Why did you pick the University of Windsor to study?

The major reason is that it has a co-op program, so I get to do my thesis as well as get some work experience. As an international student, that is very important for me. I had some experience back in my country, but I needed some Canadian experience and I need to know about the work culture here.

I realized that here it’s more free, plan your own day, do your own research, and maximize your efficiency. Here I find it’s more flexible, especially in this job, I can work from home and if I really need to, I can come in early and do the rest of my work from home. That’s mainly because the nature of the work, but also because of the culture here.

 

How did you become interested in computer programming?

My major influence was my computer science teacher in my school. He used to show these cool projects in the class and I got really influenced by that. Also, when I learned programming for the first time, I could tell the computer what it has to do and it does exactly what I need. It was so amazing at that time.

 

What advice would you give to someone starting out?

Although, you don’t need any formal education to begin your career in this area, if you have the opportunity to, get some formal course or training on computer science so you can learn what’s going on behind the back. If you know how the code you wrote is interpreted and processed by the machine, you will write a lot better software because you know how to optimize it.

Another suggestion I have, is to have patience.

You’ll run into errors for the whole day and some of the things could seem complicated in the beginning. This happens to even experienced developers. Never stress yourself out.

Try to walk away from computer for some time, or get someone else review your work.

 

How is software engineering changing?

This industry is changing rapidly, every day. Over a few years is very hard to predict where it will go. There is new technology coming. The things we have to write code for in the past, those things are now automated. You have to write code for automation now. Data is currently very hot, so I think the next thing will be using big data, analyzing, and making products for that.