Time travels of a software aficionado
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(This was originally published in 2013… thought I’d dust it off and publish it.)
It still amazes me how far the human race has progressed in technology over the past 40 years. I mean, look at written history over the past couple of THOUSAND years, then look at what we’ve been able to achieve just in my lifetime!
I was a programmer since grade school. I used to tag along with a buddy of mine down the street to the local community college and spend my afternoons typing BASIC programs into a DEC PDP-11 via a DEC terminal. These programs would spit out cool banners on the fan-fold dot matrix printer that said things like “Merry Christmas” and “Happy Birthday” over a 3-foot long matrix of repeating characters. Imagine a 100 “H” characters to make up one big “H”. etc.
I had a Commodore 64 and I took BASIC programming on an Apple IIe in high school. Then came University of Maryland with a campus full of Macs, PCs and IBM midrange systems. I was enamored by the NeXT, but we didn’t have those on our campus. But it raised my awareness of OS/2 from IBM. (Who cared about Windows, I always killed that TSR for a straight DOS prompt and a copy of WordPerfect.)
Then came a long stretch as a programmer with IBM. I graduated Maryland using IBM PS/2 machines, but the day I started at IBM, they plopped a 5250 on my desk. WTF is this thing? And what are all of these APL characters for? Ok, good thing I didn’t do assembler or APL. I specialized in PL/I, which was kind of a cross between COBOL and C depending on what you wanted to do with it. Pretty cool language actually.
The most fun I had, but what also burned me out on programming, was working on the IBM Results systems for the Atlanta Olympic Games. I used all of my skills at the time. Requirements gathering from international constituents; distributed DB2 databases (mainframe, midrange/unix, local OS/2); prototyping; training an all volunteer staff while iteratively prototyping better interfaces; working with other technology teams like Swiss Timing and the Atlanta Olympic Broadcast team (TV); and tons of C; and tons of debugging; and occasionally finding bugs in OS2 and DB2 (yeah! Not my fault!). At the end of that 3 year period, I had successfully written all of the software that ran Beach Volleyball, I ran the venue and got to see every match and meet all the players. It was awesome! But it was also about 2000 hours of overtime to achieve the deadlines. I was burnt. I didn’t want to program anymore.
Then I got lured into “management”. I became a road warrior consultant and I moved from programmer/consultant to project management, then into program management, etc. That still wasn’t as satisfying, so I got my MBA at Emory and moved over to the IBM Software Group as the product marketing manager for the initial launch of Eclipse. My job was to coordinate the marketing programs between IBM and all of the participating companies from the WebSphere/Partnerworld point of view. It was a blast! But then I got the itch to become an entrepreneur. Itch, itch, itch… grass is greener, grass is greener, grass is greener.
At the end of the day, I am most valueable and happiest, when I am solving technical and business problems and being creative. Yes, I know a bit about telling people what to do (management), telling the world about products (marketing/sales), telling the engineers how to build what the market wants (product management), etc. But at the end of the day, I’m an idea guy. I like building and mastering “things” and “organizations” and mentoring others on how to do the same.
I spent the better part of 9 months trying to get Fractal Rock off the ground (cloud based neural network environment). I took my knowledge of C/C++, found a toolkit that let me build webpages out of C++, and started building a cloud-based utility for pattern recognition. That was fun, but my primary customer never came through with the funding. Scratch that, they might have come through with the funding if I’d given them a rather large % of the ownership of the company. At the time, I was not as seasoned as I am now, and I realize I should have given them the ownership percentage they desired. I would now own the company outright, and have a world-wide customer, even though that world-wide customer would have been under one conglomerate’s umbrella. (Different blog post for another day)
Then the iPhone came along….
What got me excited about iOS in the first place (2007) was the ability to take all of the mainframe and midrange data and put it in people’s everyday lives. It’s grown by leaps and bounds since then. There are so many areas of the ecosystem that can make end-users lives more productive and more fun. And the development and production environment (equipment+software+channel) is first class and focused.
You’ve probably gotten to this point in the post and wondered what is the point? There is no point. The story continues to unfold.
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