January 2020 - Developer Nation Blog

Developers: Sometimes You Can Quit Your Day Job

Developers: sometimes you can quit your day job!

First up is Melanie Lombardi, from Echo Visuals. Five years ago, she received a Galaxy S6 Edge device as a gift and discovered she could personalize her device with content from the Galaxy Themes store. Soon after, she saw a banner in the store that Samsung was accepting new applications for themes designers. She applied, was selected, and initially created a few free themes which consumers liked and downloaded. After that, she moved to create paid themes and began to monetize her work. She, and her husband John, focused on creating high-quality, animated themes that Samsung’s customers instantly took to. After a few years, she was able to quit her full-time job and turn her passion into a new business.

This business has now grown to seven full-time employees building content for the Galaxy portfolio of devices. As one of Samsung’s top themes sellers, Echo Visuals was one of the winners in this year’s Best of Galaxy Store Awards, which recognizes top apps and content.

Second is Tony Morelan. Tony had spent his entire career as an independent graphic designer focused on all things tech. In 2017, he heard about the opportunity to build watch faces for Galaxy Watch wearable devices. He was excited about the opportunity to apply his design skills to popular technology and make some additional money on the side.

As he built and sold watch faces through the Galaxy Store under the brand name Axeir, Tony found that he also loved being a part of the Samsung Developers community. He shared best practices with other designers and tips for getting discovered in the store. He soon realized “teaching” filled a void he never knew he had.

When a job opportunity came up for Tony to join Samsung as a developer evangelist, he jumped at the chance. For more than a year now, Tony has been advocating for our ever-growing community of designers and creating new tools to help them be successful.

Pursuit your passion

When Melanie and Tony joined the Samsung Developer Program, they never could have anticipated where it would take their careers. To all of my peers in developer relations, how are you enabling those in your community to grow and discover new opportunities? To all of the developers and designers out there, have you tried something new lately? You’ll never know where it may take you. Sometimes you can quit your day job and pursue your passion.

Lori Fraleigh is the Senior Director of Developer Relations at Samsung Electronics. She is an established industry thought leader in developer relations, software tools, development environments, and platforms. Lori is passionate about delivering an awesome developer experience and excels at breaking things. Prior to Samsung, Lori held similar roles at Intuit, Amazon/Lab126, HP/Palm and Motorola Mobility. Earlier, she led RTI’s developer tools business to a successful acquisition by Wind River. Lori started her career working on mission control software at NASA/Loral and is a Virgin Galactic Future Astronaut.

How developers see themselves?

For the first time in our Q2 2019 Developer Economics survey, we tried to introduce developers in their own words by asking them about how they see themselves.

We provided a set of 21 words and asked them to choose up to five to form a word sketch of their personality. We also gave them the opportunity to provide their own text description.

Here’s what we got:

Over half of the developers say they are logical

Perhaps unsurprisingly, nearly six out of ten developers say they are logical. And as it turns out this is the most popular choice of description across all software development sectors, except in games development. Next in line, but some way behind, are the descriptors team player and introvert at 37% each. By comparison, just 10% label themselves as an extrovert. But can you guess which programmers consider themselves less introvert? Those involved in AR/VR and IoT sector. Interesting, right?

Moving on to a slightly more unusual pair of labels: there are slightly more dog lovers than cat people in the developer population, although the numbers are close at 15% and 13% respectively. A much greater difference seems to exist though between developers working at night (night owls, 29%) and those who prefer the fresh morning breeze (early birds, 14%).

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What about hobbies and spare time?

A third (33%) of developers say they are a reader, which makes it the most popular choice of description related to spare-time activities. It is closely followed by 31% who say they are a gamer. Our data shows that developers tend to perceive themselves differently as they grow older. More than one in three developers up to the age of 34 years consider themselves to be a gamer, compared to fewer than one in four of the 35-44 age group, and fewer than one in five of the 45-54-years. Older programmers are more likely to describe themselves as readers.

“What’s this “real life” you’re talking about like? Is it similar to WoW? Does it run on a 64 bit OS?”

Other activities such as music and sport score lower, at 20% and 17%. A low 7% make LEGO models, although the popularity of LEGO seems to be very much dependent upon age. A respectable 12% of developers under 18 make LEGO models, but the proportion halves to 6% within the age group 18-24.

What about the artistic ones?

Even though a developer’s work demands a high level of creativity, just 14% use “artistic” to describe themselves. Those involved in games or in augmented reality and virtual reality development are far more likely than others to use this word to describe themselves. 21% of game developers and about 25% of AR/VR developers see themselves as artistic, as compared to 16% or less of desktop, web and backend developers.

Lastly, in out Q2 2019 Developer Economics survey, a few programmers were confused as to why we were asking the question and pondered if we were trying to set up a dating site. Well, we weren’t! We were collecting the data to create the State of the Developer Nation Report, 17th Edition.

Interested in joining forces with 40,000 developers worldwide in shaping the future of the developer ecosystem? Take our survey.