Writing On A Saturday?

Show yourself grace, but get back on the horse as soon as possible, right? Fortunately I happen to have some free time this morning. Did the breakfast dishes while listening to some Pink Floyd, which took me right back to high school when I was an obsessive fan (circa “The Division Bell”). It got me reminiscing as well about the various kinds of software development I’ve done over the years. Here’s some significant milestones:

• Age 4: Dad buys our family its first computer, a TI-99/4A
• Age 5: Someone gives me a green paperback with a bunch of Basic programs; I spend hours typing them into the computer and figuring out how to print the American flag in ASCII characters, among other things
• Age 7: I’m a regular at the local library’s “programming” section, and start writing simple games (still on the TI computer, and still all in Basic)

• Age 9: My first upgrade: a Tandy 1000 TL/2 from Radio Shack; within a few days of having it at home I inadvertently format the boot disk, bricking the machine
• Age 10: Now having the ability to save programs to floppy disk, I get pretty into QuickBASIC, especially fiddling with the game Gorillas
• Age 11: We upgrade again, to a Tandy 386, with an internal hard drive and VGA graphics; somehow my parents think it’s a good idea to put the computer in my bedroom
• Age 12: I teach myself C, and begin memorizing powers of 2 (up to 65,536) and digits of Pi (3.14159265)
• Age 14: I take a correspondence course in Pascal, where I learn legitimate structured programming; lacking email or the Internet, I printed out code and mailed it to my teacher
• Age 16: Wanting to keep a secret journal, I write an encryption algorithm (a substitution cipher that would have worked reasonably well had I not used Pascal’s built-in pseudo-random number generator); but it was enough to keep my sister out
• Age 17: The Internet happens; “hijinks” ensue of which I will speak no more
• Age 18: Now running a Pentium 2, my dad comes home from work to find I’d completely disassembled the machine; he was not pleased, but I put it right back together again without issue
• Age 19: I take my first college course (C programming); it was interminably boring
• Age 20: VisualBasic comes so quickly to me that I finish the entirety of the class’s projects in a couple of weeks; I was so brazen I told the professor I had no intention of coming to class the rest of the semester except to take exams (still got an A)
• Age 21: Compilers, number theory, combinatorics, and linear algebra give me all kinds of new programming ideas; I spend gobs of my free time optimizing an algorithm to compute the largest possible determinant of an nxn binary matrix
• Age 22: I write a Monte Carlo Simulation to determine if there’s an advantage to having the first turn in Monopoly (spoiler alert: there is); I also get hired by TRW
• Age 23: My boss hands me a book on Ada and tells me I have 2 weeks to learn it; I do so by porting a bunch of my college work, in particular a Number Jumbler solver
• Age 24: During my time at graduate school I make side money doing LaTeX typesetting
• Age 27: Now back at Northrop Grumman, I build an algorithms doing terrain analysis and flight path optimization (still in Ada)
• Age 28: Ada goes the way of the dodo, and I’m porting stuff to C; I’m also starting to get into mapping software and learn the “right” way to compute distances on the Earth’s surface
• Age 29: I write my favorite single piece of code ever (ask if you’re curious)
• Age 30: My first visit to San Diego, where I give a presentation on my flight path algorithm
• Age 31: I spend way too much time working on a huge proposal that we end up not submitting
• Age 32: We move to San Diego and I get my first taste of technical leadership; I also start learning the basics of HTTP API design
• Age 33: Thinking of making a job change, I go to my first interview since college; it does not go well, and I decide to take a couple classes on web development at SDSU to beef up my resume
• Age 34: I convince my management to buy an 84″ touchscreen for our mapping application; we make the interns assemble the stand
• Age 35: After nearly 13 years, I take my second job at Everyone Counts who I somehow tricked into believing I knew Java (which I’d learned in college but hadn’t seriously used since)
• Age 36: I mistakenly reveal I took a class in Perl at SDSU, which I eventually use to become the technical lead for the company’s voting application
• Age 37: It’s a year of learning, as I get a Code School account and get smart(ish) on Angular, Node.js, and Docker, among other things
• Age 38: I revive this blog and decide to write a bulleted list of my history of software development

Well, that was fun (for me, at least); I probably could have doubled the length, but I’ve already spent too much time on it. If you’ve read this far, I thank you!