Stack Overflow...

//SYSIN

Starting anything new is difficult!

On that note I declare and initialize my Stack Overflow blog.

I'll try not to make this a core dump (archaic term) of 30-some odd years of garbage collected and stuck in a brain whose first paid programming assignment required a wooden mallet, various metal components, and not one iota of symbolic computer code.

Things change daily ...and change ...and continue to change ...into something new and potentially world-altering, until finally, if you've been around long enough ...you see the same substance and form morph back into it's original appearance.

But very few technologies become world-altering ...and the interaction of between all of them brings profound change that goes unnoticed. Small steps in sequence make a long journey --few truly large jumps ever occur.

Take computing for example ...it yoyos between distributed and centralized every 5 years or so. And each time there's a transition, the new visionaries expound like it never happened before. After you've seen it happen a few times, the latest innovations are nothing more than increasingly complex versions of the castoffs from half a decade ago.

"What, in your view are the truly world-altering technologies?" you might ask.

1. Object-oriented programming
2. The "Internet" whatever that might be ...TCP/IP? HTTP? definitely FTP
3. Jump Drives
4. Remote desktop

These are the notable things that have changed my life as a programmer across a continuum from wooden mallet all the way to IDEs with code-completion and syntax checking. Three of the four of them, I might note, involve WHERE rather than HOW. I still keep code and documentation in my shirt pocket ...but just in an electronic, jump drive version of what I used to scratch on the back of a punched card.

Starting anything new is difficult?

No ...starting anything new is the easy part. Persisting with it ...changing it in small increments into something more, something meaningful, something unnoticably world-altering --that's the hard part of doing.

Enough retrospective ...this blog is about today, and the future from a "mature" programmer who has made every attempt to keep up with "modern" methods and technology.

Whether I persist in this effort depends on your comments and feedback. I'll try a post or two, and if I end up talking to myself ...we'll just have to see if it's worth the effort.

999 /*

<p>I don't know where all of that nostalgic drivel came from on my initial post. I needed to be hit in the head with the wooden mallet instead of programming with it... </p>

<p>My daughter is sick today, so I'm working from home. Remote Desktop over VPN is great! However, I've about had enough of the Wiggles. </p>

<p>I've already been on SQL Server Enterprise Manager and fixed one problem. Answered a few eamils (I have webmail but don't like it nearly enough to use it if I can get to my desktop system). Sometimes I work from home through VPN for months at a time. I get a lot more lines of code delivered faster, and big projects usually find my boss throwing me out of the office till I get finished. </p>

<p>The worst part of working from home is if you're dealing with hardware. I had an extra Dell Small Form-factor workstation with 2D barcode scanner, mag stripe reader, and receipt printer cluttering things up for 5 months last year. I was physically present in the office about 7 times during that period.</p><p>It's hard stop working once you're heads-down coding, so I may not be that much more productive, but it sure is more convenient and comfortable doing it from home.</p>

I don't know where all of that nostalgic drivel came from on my initial post. I needed to be hit in the head with the wooden mallet instead of programming with it...

My daughter is sick today, so I'm working from home. Remote Desktop over VPN is great! However, I've about had enough of the Wiggles.

I've already been on SQL Server Enterprise Manager and fixed one problem. Answered a few eamils (I have webmail but don't like it nearly enough to use it if I can get to my desktop system). Sometimes I work from home through VPN for months at a time. I get a lot more lines of code delivered faster, so big projects usually find my boss throwing me out of the office till I get finished.

The worst part of working from home is if you're dealing with hardware. I had an extra Dell Small Form-factor workstation with 2D barcode scanner, mag stripe reader, and receipt printer cluttering things up for 5 months last year. I was physically present in the office about 7 times during that period.

It's hard stop working once you're heads-down coding, so I may not be that much more productive, but it sure is more convenient and comfortable doing it from home.