Still Keeping in the Development Loop

One of the things that my career break has taught me is that I’m not yet ready to retire. This is good because the kids still need educating and that still needs financing. I also still enjoy playing with computers, much as I did when Dad first brought home a Philips G7000 and then a Commodore 16 with a spiral-bound manual when I was much younger and slightly more impressionable.

Learning to program (Commodore BASIC) opened my eyes to the possibilities for how computers could make life easier and better for us. The computing power available to us now is clearly much, much more significant (as is the energy bill to power and cool it), and the kinds of problems computers are solving have grown to include the kinds of problems computers have created. I’m still interested in solving problems for humans, a few(!) decades later, and sometimes this still involves programming.

A few years ago I wrote about Keeping in the Development Loop, and not much has changed there. I haven’t gone out of my way to stay up to date with tech while I’ve been “off”, but I have kept my hand in somewhat. I still identify as a programmer. Whenever anyone asks me what I do for a living, I say “I’m a software engineer”, and I cannot see that changing, no matter what level of an organisation I may find myself at. I’m drawn to tech (new and old) like a moth to a flame.

When I do retire, I do hope that Corey Quinn is still writing and podcasting about tech. His newsletters and podcasts have me laughing out loud and have the benefit that I still learn about the hundreds of cloud offerings out there (many of which are solving problems created by other cloud offerings).

For a great recent example, check out Ratissimo! Thank you, Corey.