The Codist

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 went out to eat,

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

Twitter Was An Awesome Idea But Never A Viable Business

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

Your Job As A Programmer Is Not To Enrich Your Employer

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

Twitter's API Is Now Completely Pointless

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

Image of man walking down an empty road.

Why I Retired, And Why That's Not Common

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

Image of man tossing computer into dumpster, from Parks & Recreation

Sometimes You Just Want To Toss Your Computer In A Dumpster

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

Remaining Relevant Over Four Decades

Four decades is a long time to be a programmer. I started in 1981 and retired in 2021. During that time, almost everything changed, and I had to change with it. While my situation may be different than starting today, much of what I learned over time can still be

What Programming Was Like In 1981 At My First Job

Forty-two years ago, I started my programming career with no interest in having one; I only wanted to work a couple of years before beginning a Ph.D. in Chemistry. Yet the experiences and opportunities working in my first job made this career all I wanted to do. Some of

A Most Interesting Bug

This is the story of a fun afternoon spent tracking down an unknown problem that led to 4 different crashes, all without any idea of what it could be. My team supports code in two of our apps plus is working on a huge new project that is something the

How Often Should You Ship?

Back in the floppy-in-a-box days we tried to ship no more than twice a year or so, as it cost money to ship a new version and often we had to charge the customers at least something for it. For Trapeze and Deltagraph back then we never had to ship

How Many People Does It Take To Write Software

There is a joke that asks, how many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb? First you need a business analyst, a product manager, a scrum master/project manager, an architect, a DBA, a designer, a QA manager, a release manager, a tester… hmm, did I forget

The Future Is Always Different Than You Can Imagine

Thirty-six years ago this week I started working as a programmer. My first job was working at a defense contractor. I had no experience or education in programming other than some high school classes (we had a teletype machine connected to some mainframe somewhere) and my own self taught ability

More Bugs Fixed In Every Release!

I find reading app release notes a fun pastime. For whatever reason people who write these release notes in the App Store have no imagination, or a perverse sense of humor, or they have resorted to smoking funny cigarettes. So many release notes include the phrases, in some version: "Bug

What Your App's Crash Rate Can Tell You

When I shipped my first app 30 years ago, once we put it on a floppy and in the box and sent it away we had basically no idea what the ultimate customer experienced—unless they called us. Today the options for knowing what the end user is experiencing for

Shipping

In every project there comes an important time every one of us gets to, assuming it's not cancelled: Shipping. Somehow all the work you've slaved over has to be deployed to production, rolled out to customers, pushed to an App Store, or like I did 30 years ago, baked into

The Biggest Difference Between Coding Today and When I Started in the 80’s

I’m a lot older. But seriously, the biggest skill back then was invention, creativity, imagination, whatever you would like to call it; unlike today there was no Google, no Stackoverflow, no open source at your fingertips, rarely even someone to email to ask for help. You were basically programming

The Six Goals Of Every Programming Project

When I shipped my first app in 1987, Trapeze, I had no idea how many more things I would be shipping over the next 30 years. In all that time I have been working to reach the same end goals for each project release. None of these have changed from

Strive For Simple In Everything

Having shipped software for more than 30 years now, in many different environments and industries and forms, the one thing I’ve found that distinguishes the best projects from the not so good ones is Simple. Simple is not simplistic, it isn’t quick and dirty, it isn’t lazy,

How Might the Internet Change Without Net Neutrality?

Now that the new administration is in, it’s strange to me that no one is thinking about what might happen to the internet given the desire to kill net neutrality in the U.S. For those not knowledgeable of what net neutrality means, it basically means you can connect

25 Ways To Make Your Software Development More Awesomely Crappy!

1. Make everything as complicated as possible, if not more so 2. Call everything Agile, especially the stuff that isn’t 3. Plan everything in advance; make sure you get sign-offs from every layer of management, accept random deadlines, calculate the whole project’s story points long before you start

The Story of My First Startup 30 Years Ago

This is a story of my first startup from 1985-1988; some of this will seem so familiar to people who have started companies today and some will seem completely alien as the world was much different back then. People haven’t changed much but technology, knowledge, the market and opportunities

I Miss Being Part Of A Complete Team

I work for Ginormous Corp, Massive Division, as part of a high profile project, doing the part of it everyone is watching. Yet we are dependent on a dozen teams, spread out over the whole division, with an insane amount of dependencies, meetings, processes, systems and modules. Constant changes coming

Lessons Learned Shipping Apps

I shipped my first app Trapeze to real paying customers in January of 1987. Yes, that’s thirty years ago. Man am I old. Over the years I’ve worked on and shipped a lot of apps, and delivered app like projects. Although every industry and type of app may