How Many Hours Can You Code?

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

My Art And Color-After Tiling

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

How I Defeated An MMO Game Hack Author

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

Why I Use Swift To Make Generative Art

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.

How Talking Over A Wall Changed My Direction As A Programmer

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

How To Know When It's Time To Go

I retired in 2021 at 63.5 after about four decades as a programmer. What made me do this was not failing ability in any way, but after a year of consideration, I realized I didn't care to do it anymore. Everyone will eventually reach a point at

My Address Doesn't Fit, And Other Complaints

So today, I decided to renew my driver's license online, like any modern person would. I started the process by going to my state's driver's license website. The first page is to verify my home and mail addresses. Since nothing changed, I hit "

Yet Another Post On Scrum, But Different

Everyone hates Scrum, or at least it seems so, except for management. I did as well, but a difference is that I started my career in 1981, long before the hordes of Scrums took root. 1981, you say, so you must have done Waterfall, so you are old and have

Career Retrospective: Being Interviewed

I'm starting a series on what I learned during my four decades as a working programmer. First, I will describe my experience of being interviewed. Interviews are part of being a programmer; every time you find a new job, you will go through interviews, which allow a prospective

If You Don't Give A Crap, This Is the Shit That You Get

Being retired after four decades as a programmer, there is nothing more irritating than seeing broken or poor functionality in web and mobile apps. I always cared about what we were putting out, even if it was sometimes unimportant to my employer. When I see things that are easy to

A Programming Career By The Numbers

As I continue to recover from some health issues that kept me from writing, I thought it might be interesting to describe my long career with numbers. If you wind up working for four decades, your experience may vary. Years Active: 1981-2021, totaling 39.5 years. Irrespective of my title

My Wikipedia Entry For Trapeze

Maury Markowitz wrote up the story of Trapeze (covered earlier in this blog) on Wikipedia. It sure seems like a long time ago.

I Am Happy Not To Be A Web Developer Anymore

I wrote my first single-page web app in Javascript in 2005, right after learning about XMLHttpRequest and before any serious frameworks existed. I left professional web development behind around 2009 (I started in 1997 with WebObjects) and spent the final decade of my career doing mobile. I look at the

Good Programmers Can Be Anyone, But Not Everyone

In my four decades as a programmer, I've worked with hundreds of programmers, and I can say that no single type of person is good at programming. I've seen young people who could do amazing work and those without a clue. I've seen programmers

Looks Good To Me: When Code Reviews Go Awry

Code reviews can effectively improve code quality in large or mixed teams with experience differences. They can also be useless if not done correctly or if management does not support the time to do them. A code review is a modern invention, as the technology to do them easily did

Learn Something New Every Day

You can't stay relevant for over 40 years without learning new things. In my first job in the early 80s, learning new things was a fundamental requirement to being a programmer—almost everything you did was new, both to you and often to everyone else. I started a

Why Are People Still Using C?

C is second in the latest TIOBE list of the most popular languages. I find it hard to understand why, unless there is a lot of existing code to support, I can't fathom why anyone would start something new in 2023 in C. I first learned C in

I Am Not Betty, And I Can't Do Anything About It

At some point around 2016, a person named Betty, in the town I used to live in, gave my phone number to someone (either by accident or a random number), and it became associated with her name and address. Her home sits atop a giant gas field, and she gets

My Compensation Over Four Decades As A Programmer

It's a lie, as I don't remember exactly what I made in every job, and it changed during each job. Also, I never worked for a big tech company (other than Apple briefly, but that was when they were going out of business) and only a

The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Estimates

In my long career, I've dealt with many different kinds of estimating, from the early days in the 1980s when there was no estimating because no one had any idea how to do it to my last job where estimation was always demanded but never actually relevant. In

Puzzled Why Instagram Fails on Safari

I wanted to look at Instagram to see if every art hashtag was still overwhelmed with terrible AI art, but today on Safari, all I get for every page is: It works on every other browser I have. But why? In the console are two errors, found and placed there

Has Anyone Noticed How Bloated The Internet Has Become?

I was on a cruise recently, and trying to read anything online was painful since thousands shared my internet connection at sea. Reading a relatively lightweight site like Google News generally gave me time to get an ice cream cone before the page appeared. Has everyone abandoned building minimal apps

I Learned How To Program 50 Years Ago

In the fall of the 1973-1974 school year, my public high school offered a class in computer programming. This class was rare for its time, as there were few computers in the world accessible for students, and most people had no idea what they could do other than seeing HAL

I Have To Fix Broken Things

Call it a character flaw or a character benefit—I hate being around broken code, processes, products, or UI. If it's broken, I want to fix it. If I can't, it grates on me. After I graduated from college, my parents, a friend, and his parents

Working At Home Over The Decades

When I started in the early 80s, working at home was never an option—in fact, it took decades to become practical, even though I occasionally could do it under limited circumstances. In my last year working before I retired, I spent the entire Covid year working at home. I