I've been working as a professional software engineer for the last twenty years.There are few areas of our personal and working lives untouched by software in one form or another. It's not unusual, therefore, for those that build software to specialise in a certain field, for instance e-Commerce, accountancy systems, or mobile application development. The type of software I've worked with most extensively are systems that support business operations and logistics. Particularly in the dairy (Fonterra) and maritime industries. My latest (solo) work may be found at www.marineberth.com.From quite early on in my career I've held a special interest for what makes software robust and what makes software brittle. The latter has surely led to numerous high profile cases of software project failure. Often at great cost. Outcomes, whether positive or negative, are almost always preceded by recognisable patterns. Learning these patterns of success and patterns of failure - not technology alone - has been a constant throughout my IT career. Applying them in my work has brought real benefits in critical areas such as data modelling, UI/UX design and change management.An area of personal fascination is how software engineering has benefitted by plagiarising from the many elegant designs found in nature. (This is certainly true of Java - an object oriented programming language - which rests on the ability to model parts of the real world, often entities in the business domain.) Whether it be rooted in the laws of physics or the DNA blueprint of life itself, we are, in fact, surrounded by highly complex systems that simply work. Borrowing heavily from these has allowed engineers to build larger and more complicated systems. You could say that, for as long as our physical universe continues to hold us in awe, software engineering can never grow boring!