punk-coder

I worked at a web hosting company in Atlanta back in 2002, called Interland. In 2003 we purchased a company called Trellix which let you build websites through a web interface. I remember our first meeting with Trellix when some guy walked through the door to the conference room; t-shirt covered by a flannel, ripped jeans, Converse, long hair and beard. I was like, “holy sh*t, it’s Dan Bricklin!” He was great to work with. One of those rare times you meet someone who can be listed as a big contributor to your field of work.

I may have put them in a rung higher than they are, since I didn’t listen to them back when they were big and touring, so I only know them more by who they tour with now, but his band is Sister Hazel.

I have a friend that is the drummer in a band that had a couple big hits in the 90’s, not going to drop names, but their contemporaries are bands like Collective Soul, Gin Blossoms, that kind of stuff. They have a few gold records. To this day they still tour every year and make enough money off touring and royalties to make a good living. I grew up on punk and thrash metal, so had never heard of his band, so it surprised me how close to 30 years later they still get booked at Disney and on rock cruises, but happy he still gets to keep doing that.

“Knowing when not to code is possibly the most important skill a programmer can learn.” - The Art of Readable Code

I think if you look at some companies that have been around for a long time you’ll find quite a few older people that are still doing development. I just celebrated my 20th year being at the media company I work for. There are still a few developers here from back when I started.

I’m 52, been a professional developer close to 30 years. Quite a few developers I started off with back in the day are still doing development, but quite a few ended up going the management path. My old department head had me try out the managing architect role for a bit, but I hated it, so I went back to the technical side.

I’m in Atlanta, and can think of companies like Georgia Pacific, Synovous, Home Depot, Delta, Chic-fil-a, Coca Cola, UPS, and quite a few others having developers older than me or near my age still working there.

I’ve seen a lot of these lists lately, but this is the first one I can say I really agree with a lot of the points. I’ve been a professional developer close to 30 years, and have picked up a lot of these same lessons. I like lesson number 1, as I think sometime developers feel they need to come up with some clever way to stand out or show off and you learn over time that every line of code you write is a line of code that needs to be supported. Straight forward code may not show off your skills, but other team members and future developers will like it.

As a quick follow up. When I started development professionally in 1996, it definitely wasn’t for money. My roommate who was a waitress in a nice restaurant here in Atlanta made twice what I brought home. I just loved that I went into work each day and got paid to solve problems. I see so many developers these days that are just in it for the money, and they’re really not enjoyable to work with.

I was born in 1971, my first exposure to a computer was an Apple II running Logo in one of my gifted classes. I was hooked at that moment. My main hobby today at 52 is still coding. At work I am an analytics architect. Pretty much means I help design everything, but I also do a lot of the coding. I hate web development, especially the Angular/Typescript stuff we do, but I make up for it by doing my own thing (assembler and C) on my own stuff. I don’t think I’ll ever stop enjoying it.

I wasn’t affected by the dot com bubble luckily. I worked for a consulting firm in Atlanta during that time, and we had an office in an incubator called TechNest. My boss lent us out to various people there. I worked with a guy that ran a company called Dot Com Graveyard. Basically helped him with the backend for his site that let people buy all the stuff like Herman Miller chairs and other dot com stuff he got from the failed companies. Also helped a few guys that got the remains of real estate.com get hooked up with Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac using Biz Talk Server as that is what they got with the deal of salvaging realestate.com. It was a decent time for consultants to help clean up the pieces from what I remember.

My grandfather was a medic and was part of the storm of Normandy beach on D-Day. He never really spoke of it and had a stroke and passed away before Saving Private Ryan came out. We wondered what he would have thought of the beginning of that movie, as someone who was there and was running around helping people the whole time.

Just playing around with it with the remote they don’t have to be older than maybe in elementary school like my neighbors kid. If you mean assembly and doing some programming I would think middle school with an adults help for a few steps in assembly. Some of the toughest assembly is getting the wiring to go through to where everything can close properly, otherwise not too bad.

I have the authors Programming Atari 2600 Games and really enjoyed it. I started my professional programming career programming in Assembler on an OS/360 mainframe back in the mid 90s and it really helped me starting out at such a low level. It was enjoyable revisiting Assembler while going through his book.

Xcrement

My wife and I were in Washington DC back in 2018-2019 and happened to go into the Botanical Garden while out walking. There was a crowd gathered and we found out a corpse flower had bloomed there. It was quite a sight to see and the smell lives up to it’s name. It was a lot bigger than I expected.

A majority of the cars on my street, in Decatur, GA, are electric. It sound like a scene from a sci-fi movie when the wife and I sit on our front porch. All the cars making a light whirling sound as they drive by. I think the loudest vehicle on our street is a moped that drives by each morning.