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 have

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

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

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 "

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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