I'm a software engineer that's been in the field for a little over 10 years now. I started out as a C programmer on "soft" embedded systems (cable set-top boxes FWIW). Since then I have moved to the other side of the client-server system and have been specializing in distributed systems development in C++ & Java. Over the past few years, I've moved from the distributed systems space to a email marketing company where I am part of the team responsible for the Python and Perl code that runs their infrastructure.