A Decade In The Life Of A Programmer

[CraigD]

The watercooler, envisioned as a hub of hypographic hob-knobery, has been vacant for 60 days! If it were a real room, spiders would have cobwebbed it over (or at least made a start of it).

 

So, as one with a personal interest in having a virtual social life in this small, focused forum (vs. the diffuse vastness of facebook, etc), I’ll virtual featherduster mop up the spidersilk and dust and post a lamentation of why I’ve not been online here (or anywhere to speak of) for a while:

 

It’s kinda a long (let’s call it a “decade in the life of a programmer”) story. It begins in 1967, in a celluloid-film projecting theater in New Haven, Connecticut, as my young eyes soaked in the wonder of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the for me even greater wonder of HAL, deciding right there “when I grow up, I wanna get a job working on one of those!” ... ergh, perhaps this is too far back, a really long story that goes on for a long while before getting to the “why I’ve not been posting much at hypography for the past few weeks” part. STOP.

 

It begins in the late 1990s, on a cold and rainy night, as the protagonist finds himself wisked from my accustom bus stop into the car of my recently appointed (or promoted, hired, or whatever) IT shop boss. On the boss-chauffeured ride to my home, I waxed promulguous and poetic on the subject of computer-user interfaces, mappings, and such, along the lines that anything can be made to look like anything, and moreover, should, starting tomorrow by yours truly. That didn’t happen, but somehow, like the proverbial camel sticking its nose in the sheik’s tent, but rather than slowly insinuating fully in, leaving a little software hook, I … managed to add little software hooks in all the IO utility of my company’s largest and most important computer system, and use them in small ways to commit feats of wonder and amazement.

 

Somewhere in that fin de millénaire oration were the words “web browser”, and gushing attestation about how soon they’d be the only thing anybody used to do anything on a computer (this was the beginning of the browser golden age, before apps crept into our lexicon and the GUI launchers of our cellphones and tablets – well, before our cellphones had GUIs, and there were tablets).

 

Scroll forward to about 2001, and my way tread a guru audience-seeking programmer bearing a request along the lines of “we need one of those interwebby suggestion form screens”, and quicker than you can say wham, bam, and thank you for the prototype, whipped up an application of that “anything can be made to look like anything” principle I’d been so long talking about. It goes well. A whitepaper is written, read, and fades away. As things turned out, the folk who thought they needed to collect suggestions found they didn’t, really, want suggestions, and lovely web page was allowed to fade into obscurity and, years later, “not worth the effort to port to a new platform” retirement, but, as the jargon goes, the concept was well and truly proved.

 

... I’m getting to the part about ignoring hypography – just a few narrative years more ...

 

Ten years more or less later, come some minions of the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002 speaking words including “security” and “in-transit encryption”. I point out the little padlock icon on the everybody’s browser, and a few PowerPoint decks and programmer-in-salesperson-clothing meetings later, have revived my old “making anything look like anything (especially a browser)” user interface strategy. I write a prototype. Demonstrations and happy days ensue, then a year passes, it’s Feb 2013, and I’m compelled by my corporate betters to hand development (including a 60-page “how to” design document) of the production version of my nifty little “browser terminal” to a contract programmer, protesting that this may prove a bad idea. It does, and 3 weeks ago, I’m handed back development, with the end of the month as a “can’t miss deadline” to do an estimated 300 hrs of work. (Fortunately, those estimates have been through some adjustments and iterations.

 

After getting clear of my other work, it’s fun, fun, coding fun! and as of yesterday, pretty much done with all the uncertain parts.

 

So hopefully, I’ll be able to resume my usual recreational math and science reading writing now, starting with that paper by the proclaimed “China’s Ramanujan” that may be about the prime gap or twin primes conjectures – the pop press seems unsure and contradictory, and has a delightful air of can’t possibly be right.

[Buffy]

Management is only starting to catch on to the trials and tribulations of "cheaper" outsourcing.

 

This goes for VC's too by the way: a few years ago we burned through a quarter-million on an outsourced project that produced zero lines of usable code at one of our investor's insistence.

 

After a few decades doing product marketing, I've found coding's more fun too...just so long as you have the goods on your bosses....

 

Why is it drug addicts and computer aficionados are both called users? :phones:

Buffy

[C1ay]

From another point of view...

 

I've primarily been a computer hobbyist since my first Heath Kit computer back in 1979 and it's replacement, my Sinclair ZX80. I cut my teeth on machine code for the Z80 and fell in love with coding at that point. It was not my destiny though, I joined the Air Force soon after and they sent me to be a missile mechanic, more specifically a hydraulics specialist on Titan II missiles.

 

That spawned a career that has kept me busy as a hydraulics specialist and machinist through most of my life. During one of my jobs as a hydraulics systems designer for asphalt paving equipment I gained an IT manager title since I was the only techy on staff that could maintain the business software and the computer network there. There I was tasked with writing some interface code to marry the manufacturing software with the financial software to streamline the cost accounting side of administration. That was over 10 years ago and I've long since moved on but they still outsource to me on maintenance and additions to that code as their business evolves. I really wish they'd leave me alone but I can't refer them to anyone since it's my code and no one else knows it like I do.

 

Another stop I've had along the way was a lab job in QC at a paper company. I was hired there as a lab tech but the boss leveraged me to write some software for the QC department when I wasn't busy doing lab work. Now I've moved on but he still outsources the maintenance and add ons for that code to me even though they have a decent sized IT department. I really wish they'd take it over but I digress, it's my code and no one understands it like I do and that's why they bug me to keep it up.

 

Currently I'm back to what I do best, remanufacturing hydraulic components and fabricating parts for anything else I'm asked with the capabilities of my machine shop. This has thrown me a new curve though since we've been awarded the hydraulics contract for Atlanta and it requires some additional records keeping specific to that contract. Now I find myself machining parts by day and coding a new business system for our shop by night since I'm the only guy on staff with the ability.

 

Now you know why I'm so scarce around here at times.