“You’re Going to Do It”: The Moment That Made Me a Programmer
In 2011, I was an intern at Bosch’s Automotive Electronics factory — the place responsible for more than half of Bosch’s global vehicle electronics. A giant place. Four massive hangars, stretching out over 4.5 kilometers, with a central warehouse nestled in between like a heart surrounded by arteries.
I worked in Logistics IT. That meant I spent most of my days at the Helpdesk — replacing PCs, resetting passwords, installing software, and maintaining a never-ending army of laser printers. Hundreds of them. Something was always broken, jammed, or out of toner.
The logistics operation in a factory of that size is a thing of its own. Materials flowed constantly — raw parts going out, finished goods coming in — all coordinated through a system called the Milkrun.
Milkrun, a term borrowed from dairy farming, is a logistics method where one vehicle follows a defined route, picking up and dropping off items at multiple locations. In a factory, it ensures a steady, efficient supply of components to the production lines without overstocking. Like a little metro system inside the plant.
Each Milkrun train had a route and a strict timetable. Drivers scanned RFID tags at every stop, and their shift supervisors downloaded the scan data at the end of each day. The system worked — at least on paper.
But the manufacturing department started noticing something odd: some Milkruns were arriving late. Not terribly late, but enough to cause downstream delays. And no one knew why.
So they came to us, the logistics department, looking for answers.
Our team had one software developer — my colleague — who had already built some internal tooling, and was busy and made it clear he couldn’t take on another project.
Then my manager turned to me and said:
“Tamas, you're going to do this.”
“Me?! I don’t know anything about software engineering!”
“Doesn’t matter. You’re going to learn.”
And so I did.
At the time, I was a computer engineering student at a university, planning to major in hardware — specifically because it required less programming. Code didn’t click for me. It felt confusing, abstract. I was already 21 and had never really understood what programming was about.
But now I had a real-world project dropped in my lap — one with real impact and real users. So I dove in.
I didn’t know how to call a method from a class I wrote. I didn’t know what a database connection looked like, or how to parse a CSV, or generate a chart. But I started learning. Asking questions. Reading forums. Breaking things. Fixing them. Rinse and repeat.
For the next six months, I worked 12 to 14 hours a day, between the office and home. Slowly but surely, something started to take shape.
And eventually — I released Milkrun Tracker v1.
It took in raw RFID scan data, compared actual routes against the timetable, visualized delays on neat graphs, and exported CSVs filtered by line (there were 17 Milkrun lines in total). The manufacturing team was thrilled. Suddenly, they had visibility.
A few months later, I began working on version 2 — cleaner UI, faster processing, more features. I was hooked.
Around that time, a freelance developer came by to update a tool he’d built that integrated with SAP. He was sitting next to me when he glanced at my screen.
“You’re coding in C#?” he asked.
“Something like that,” I replied cautiously — still unsure of myself
“Want to work for me? I’ll pay you five dollars an hour.”
Five bucks an hour was a huge deal for an intern in Central Europe at the time. I thought about it, then said yes.
And just like that, I was juggling university, my Bosch internship, and freelance work — building a genealogy app in C# and WPF for researching family trees.
That’s how it all started.
Nine years later, after moving countries and working in different companies, I became a Technical Lead.
And today, 14 years after that first Helpdesk ticket, I’m still a Lead Engineer. I’ve worked on over 20 projects across different industries and languages — from frontends and backends to performance tuning and architecture.
And to think it all started because someone looked at me — a clueless intern — and said:
“You’re going to do it.”
Sometimes, that’s all it takes: a nudge, a bit of luck, relentless effort, and someone who sees something in you before you do.
This post is dedicated to Gábor Kis, my manager at Bosch, who believed in me before I did.