That thing that you do
Although not technically the “first” post here, I thought it might be interesting for others (oka very few others) to go into a little more depth than I have before about my careerabout what I do in the daytime.
I started out about 20 years ago as a software developer. I studied Computer Science at college, so had learned all about number processes (which everybody hates, right?), algorithms, the fetch execute cycle, and happened to be in the generation that spent endless hours writing code in Pascal, and waiting for it to compile on 286 based PCs. Most of the code served as illustrations for the topic of the weekbe that sorting, looping, data structures, user interfaces, or whatever else.
My first job in the real world coincided with the emergence of Microsoft Visual Basic. At the time Borland Delphi was handing VB it's backside, but in a story that perhaps mirrors the VHS/Betamax video war of the 80s, Visual Basic woneven though it was massively inferior to Delphi. I therefore spent the best part of 5 years writing applications in various dialects of Visual Basic while reading magazine articles about some guy called Bjarne Stroustrup that had invented an object oriented version of C. I would never get to play with C++ for work, but did write most of a chess engine “for fun” with it in my spare time.
Oh, the days when I lived on my own, had disposable income, and endless free time to pursue anything that interested meA little further on I “met a girl”, moved house, moved jobs, and found myself continuing to write Visual Basic code in the daytime, but tinkering with PHP, Javascript, and HTML in my spare time. I bought the O'Reilly books on web development, and accidentally built a ridiculously popular website for writers. Before I knew it I had become custodian of several thousand spite filled authors, when all I had really done was build a website that only dealt with text, because it was easy to think about. It was called “Thought Cafe”.
Tinkering with PHP in my spare time continuedI ended up building one of the first blogging scripts, and a content management system. I released them both as open source, and once again pretty much accidentally became something of a celebrity for a while. While thousands of people installed the scripts on their own webspace to create blogs and websites, Novell quietly picked them up and started distributing them with their Linux server distributions. The first I knew about it was when support emails started arriving from organisations all over the world.
Towards the end of that time the commercial world was finally picking up “.
NET” as a development platform. It has been around for a couple of years, but nobody really used it because it was clunky, bloated, and slow. It seemed that hardware eventually made the performance issues irrelevant, and the marketing might of Microsoft forced the corporate world into using it. Although C# was an obvious rip-off of Java, Visual Studio made it a joy to use, and before we knew it, we were all working with it on every project.
Around the same time that .
NET adoption was gathering pace, this bizarre, bloated, slow content management system entered stage-left, called “SharePoint”. We all joked about the hardware requirements to run SharePoint (we still do, ten years on), but we kept being asked to work with itand Microsoft kept making it “better” (notice the quote marks). Suddenly clients were dropping FileNET Panagon (remember that?), and Opentext Livelink in favour of SharePointregardless of if it was better or worse at the thing they wanted it to do than what they already had.
SharePoint has not been my entire world for the last decade thoughby yet another accident I became the “business process management” guy among my peers. It all started with a requirement to help a colleague out with a project, and being put on a FileNET E-Process course. I ended up never using it for a client project, but had a fun week in Basingstoke building workflows, and being taught all manner of things by a very pretty German lady.
A year later I found myself commuting to Wimbledon for a week to learn about another workflow product called Metastorm E-Work, and was taught by Henry the VIII (or at least he looked very much like the man in the paintings). This time the skills actually got used, and I spent days on end at various client sites building invoice approval systems. I also saw the effects of the stuff I was building for the first time, when an entire department was made redundant by something I had designed. Not fun.
Zooming forward another few years, and the workflow / business process automation mania has continuedfirst with K2, and latterly with Nintex. I guess in some ways I am a rare animalwhere many consultants hit the edge of the feature envelope of a given product, I can almost always revert to code, and build my own components to make products do new things. It's sometimes nice to see the look of wonderment when you tell a client “I'll just make a webservice to do that”, and they ask “you can do that?”.
I have of course (in between marriage, children, and family life) continued tinkering with the open source world. I'm amazed that PHP is still around, but perhaps not so surprised that Perl isn't. Python remains an itch that I haven't really scratched, and I'm aware of Scala, Ruby, and various other languages that I wish I had time to investigate, but like I saidlife, family, children I still put bits and pieces “out there” on the web as experiments, such as We The Users, but it is rare.
Travel is something I never anticipated either. Taking the beginning of this year as an example, I have been in the office for about five days. The rest of the time has been spent working on far flung client sites all over the countryYork, Leeds, London, Andover, and Plymouth among the various places that have knocked any fascination with hotels out of my system.
I guess the over-riding feeling about my “career” so far is that there was no great plan. I never set out to become a software developerI was just interested in making machines do things, and it turned out that was useful to rather a lot of people. I have no idea where I might be in another ten years, and it's probably futile to predict.
If you read this all the way to the end, you deserve a medal. I don't have any.