Philosophy
Over the years as a project manager and developer, it became apparent that certain methods and strategies were more successful than others - a philosophy started to build. As of now, I can summarize it by the following essential items:
Simplicity rules
As an engineer it seems inherent to always find that special fancy sophisticated solution. The opposite is often more useful - simple systems are easier to implement, more reliable, and less error-prone. Making software very flexible for possible future changes can lead to unnecessary complexity - one needs to stop and think thoroughly about what is really required and what is not.
This philosophy also applies to the usability of tools and products. Nowadays, the race for more and more features leads to more complex software that require users to increasingly spend time figuring out how software works or why it doesn't work. For higher customer satisfaction, I believe in driving towards easy-to-use systems with a well thought out number of features.
The beauty of automation
No matter which project or technology we are talking about - here they are, tedious, recurring tasks, whether it's about handling badly designed tools or the missing interfaces between various incompatible tools. With advanced scripting languages like Python, small tools that allow automation can be created amazingly fast. As an example, in a previous project I could reduce the manual ticket analysis process (Download attachments, unzip them, parse them by tool 1, parse them by tool 2, analyze the data manually) from about 30min to a fully automated process that required almost no time by the developer.
Communication is essential
Gone are the days where the "hacker" would just sit in the corner and code down the project. Nowadays projects are large and can only be handled in well working teams. Finally, I believe that the real joy in this profession is to have fun working together as a team.