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 habit of

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 1984, when

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

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 year in a tech

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 the following

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

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

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

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 went out to eat,

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

Twitter was the best communications system ever invented, providing low-barrier-to-entry communications in real-time to people worldwide, creating self-organizing circles of common interests, allowing for easy discovery, and supporting an instant source of information. But, there was never a chance of becoming a big profitable business. And yes, I deliberately used

Reading today about the furniture CEO who directed their employees to work on becoming better employees and finding more revenue instead of worrying about their bonuses made me remember situations where executives failed to communicate with us employees. My job was always to make me or my team as good

After Twitter open-sourced part of their internal source code, I finally learned what may have been plaguing my Twitter Art account (I post my new art there almost every day). A year ago, I averaged about 3,000 impressions per post, adding 700 or so monthly followers. Then, in mid-year

I started my programming career in 1981 and retired in 2021. But you probably don't know many retired programmers (other than those who retired early due to IPO or Google-type money). In 1981 there were radically fewer programmers because opportunities were far scarcer. Mainframe-type programming (terminal-server) was most of the

Technology is great until it stops working, and you have no idea why. After Twitter "open-sourced" part of its source code, I learned why my art profile (https://twitter.com/digconart) had been only getting a couple of hundred impressions per post when I had 5,700 followers but, a