Today I’m going to talk a bit about me instead of X++, Azure DevOps or LCS. Because…
On a day like this St. Patrick’s day, 10 years ago, I started working with Axapta!
In the beginning there was Axapta
My story with AX started while I was still studying at the university, 2 years before starting to work. I took a summer course during of something called Axapta. I didn’t know what it was, all I knew was that it was worth 10 non-major credits that I needed so I enrolled.
Funny thing is I also applied to a SAP course but was rejected because it was for last-year students only. Now I’m happy that I was rejected.
Devs wanna have fun
My first contact with something similar to a programming language was HTML when I was like 12 years old. I remember creating a web page on Geocities, using frames, to publish some Warcraft 2 custom maps. Years later I moved to blogs using WordPress 1.5 so I learnt some CSS and PHP as well. A lot of web-related things as you can see.
I would have loved working as a web developer, but the first offer to work I got was as an Axapta developer and I accepted.
I think I was frustrated for quite a long time. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job right now and I’m happy with how my career has evolved, but after finishing the university being an ERP developer made me feel a bit down.
We all want to do cool things when we are young, right? I just didn’t know you could do cool things with an ERP, yet.
Partner vs End client
I’ve worked in partners and end clients and I’ve enjoyed both worlds. There’s a good and a bad part in both cases. Usually in an end client your life is easier than in consulting, but you won’t have access to the same opportunities as in consultancy.
You can end up being in consulting, assigned to the same project forever, seeing the same old technologies. The bad things of an end client and consulting at the same time. You can also be lucky and work at an end client with the latest technology.
You won’t know until you’re there. There’s people that like being in consulting while some prefer end clients. And your opinion may change with time and life changes.
To 10 years more! (At that time the product will be known as Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and our Lords the Robots).
