“And then I stopped” can either be the happiest or the saddest phrase you can imagine.
I wrote my first lines of code in 1977, using a TRS-80 Model I. I was 9.
I got my first paying job as a developer in 1979 at age 11. I hung around the Radio Shack at Southland Mall at every opportunity, so when a local oilfield company needed some help customizing their accounting software, one of the sales reps told me I should call them. In 6th grade, I was making the then-unthinkable sum of $10/hour to add new printable reports to their BASIC accounting package.
More of the same kind of work in high school led me to get a degree in computer science from Georgia Tech; along the way, I added LISP, VAX assembler, Modula-2, and C to my toolbox. My first full-time job as a degree holder was working at Control Data Corporation working on VMS-based Ada compilers for Navy embedded systems. Then I went on to a NASA contractor writing Space Shuttle payload software in FORTRAN and C, then to a small shop writing Mac crypto software. On the side I had various consulting coding jobs on Windows and macOS.
And then I stopped.
My career path at that point took a sharp pivot towards sysadmin stuff, along with writing, teaching, and consulting. Learning new languages and tools took a back seat to raising a family, digging deeper into Windows internals, and doing all sorts of unmentionable things to deploy Exchange, Microsoft Office, and (later) Office 365 all around the world. I fooled around with iOS and macOS development a bit (including getting on stage in Barcelona and Dallas to show it off) but nothing major.
Then I got into product management, and then into more senior management roles, where I am now.
I never lost my interest in coding, but let’s just say a lot of my skills are largely past their sell-by date, plus there are new things I’ve never had to do. For example, I understand and am comfortable using git; fundamentally, it’s just another SCCS. I understand the primary devops concepts and have even managed teams responsible for implementing them. But at the same time, I haven’t had to use a package manager, haven’t learned any of the major UI frameworks, and don’t have any of my own code out in the world.
Editor’s note: I will patiently wait here until everyone’s gotten the Dilbert Pointy-Haired Boss jokes out of their system, or muttered something about “those who can’t do…” Joke’s on you; I don’t have any hair.
As a result of all this I’m in a weird place. I understand the concepts behind modern dev practices, but I can’t do them all on my own, basically like watching my beagle try to figure out how to get to the cabinet where the cat food is. When my team talks to me about a problem they’re having with a CI pipeline, or they debate using Pulumi vs Bicep, I’m knowledgeable enough to follow the discussion and occasionally contribute. But if Satya Nadella walked in here right now and said “deploy this pipeline and I’ll give you my G6”, I’d be out of luck.
The good news? After you’ve said “and then I stopped,” you can flip that around and say “then I began again.” That’s where I’m at now.
My goal in starting this substack is to track my reskilling as a modern full-stack dev. I have a specific project in mind, which I’ll have more to say about later. Join me on my journey!