From picking orders to designing systems
How starting on a warehouse floor shaped how I think about software.
My first job was picking orders in my father’s warehouse. Scanning barcodes, loading trucks, dealing with inventory that never matched the spreadsheet.
A year later I was managing the department. Two years later I was writing the software that replaced those spreadsheets.
The spreadsheet problem
Every warehouse runs on spreadsheets until it doesn’t. Ours broke when we hit maybe 500 SKUs. Someone would update stock in one file, someone else would take an order from another. Stuff got sold that wasn’t there. Deliveries went wrong.
I didn’t know what a “WMS” was. I just knew the spreadsheet was broken and nobody else was going to fix it.
Building for people who don’t care about code
The warehouse workers didn’t care that I used React or that the backend was in Node. They cared that scanning a barcode showed the right shelf location. That printing a delivery note took one click instead of five. That the stock number on screen matched what was actually on the shelf.
This taught me something I still carry: nobody cares about your architecture. They care if it works. They care if it’s fast. They care if it doesn’t lose their data.
What it taught me about systems
Working in the warehouse before writing the software gave me something most developers don’t have: I understood the domain before I wrote a single line of code.
I knew which processes were slow. I knew where mistakes happened. I knew which workarounds people used because the “official” process was too annoying.
When I design systems now (GPS tracking, event processing, whatever), I still think about the person at the end. Who’s looking at this dashboard? What decision are they making? What happens if this is 2 seconds slow?
No shortcuts
I didn’t go to university. I went to a technical school, then straight to work. Everything I know about building software, I learned by building software. For real users. With real consequences when things broke.
Some people find this limiting. I find it freeing. I don’t carry assumptions about how things “should” be done. I just build what works.