Four Decades Of Learning, Experiences, And Adventures
After graduating from college in 1979, I bought a then-new Apple II+ with what little money I had. Little did I know that everything that happened after that was not what I expected. I went to graduate school in Chemistry, but my faculty advisor resigned after being denied tenure, leaving
I started my career in the fall of 1981, and in the first six months, I wrote a Jovial language source code formatter in Fortran. I had no prior experience in programming jobs or college programming classes; all I knew was what I had taught myself at home. That formatter
This is not my week for using technology. None of these problems was my fault, other than my existing in the universe and the attraction that brought. Today, I wanted to review my Verizon mobile account, and I noticed that the website had changed since my last visit. I clicked
My eyesight is generally OK, but I have trouble reading small text, especially medium gray on light gray backgrounds. I usually code in 16 or even 18 point fonts, currently Atkinson Hyperlegible Mono. Every new release of Xcode makes seeing various UI elements harder, as if the designers all have
Am I a good programmer? The short answer is: I don’t know what that means. I have been programming for 52 years now, having started in a public high school class in 1973, which is pretty rare because few high schools offered such an opportunity back then. I
Having spent four decades as a programmer in various industries and situations, I know that modern software development processes are far more stressful than when I started. It's not simply that developing software today is more complex than it was back in 1981. In that early decade, none
Everyone wants the software they work on to produce quality products, but what does that mean? In addition, how do you know when you have it? This is the longest single blog post I have ever written. I spent four decades writing software used by people (most of the server
I've never used any other AI "assistant," although I've talked with those who have, most of whom are not very positive. My experience using Xcode's AI is that it occasionally offers a line of code that works, but you mostly get junk
For some purpose, the DOGE people are burrowing their way into all US Federal Systems. Their complete control over the Treasury Department is entirely insane. Unless you intend to destroy everything, making arbitrary changes to complex computer systems will result in destruction, even if that was not your intention. No
I retired almost four years ago after nearly 40 years as a programmer. While I still write code daily, I do so to support my generative art rather than get paid for it. Most of my career was spent building new applications, and no matter what my title was, I
How many hours a day can you write code, and at what point does the quality of your work go down? Even more important is how many weeks and months of that max effort you can still be effective. In my life, there have only been three periods where I
I make generative art with Swift and use tiling in many pieces. Truchet tiles are generally arranged randomly and contain everything appearing in the final image. What I do differently is to separate the layout of tiles from colorizing the image. I call this technique "Color-After Tiling." For
In the late 2000's, I worked at a niche MMO game company. We had a small team, not a lot of money, but a loyal audience. It was a game of skill without any of the usual powerups and unreality, and the players enjoyed the challenge. Then, one
Now that I am retired from programming for a living, I make generative art (not AI; see my post What Is Generative Art? ) every day. I belong to a discord community of generative artists, yet I stick out because I am the only person using Swift as my chosen language.
I started my programming career in October 1981 at a large defense contractor (GD). At the time, my goal was to work for a couple of years and then continue my education with a Ph.D. in Chemistry (I had already been accepted). The office I worked in was a