I started programming long ago, in 1975. I wrote a lunar lander program in Basic on a teletype terminal (probably ASR-33) to a minicomputer (PDP-8) at Hillsboro High School. My first programming class at MIT was in FORTRAN, using punch cards. The Internet’s predecessor, Arpanet, was at MIT already. I spent too many hours playing Zork, and chatting with people like Science Fiction legend Jerry Pournelle; I still have the green bar paper output from one of our chats in 1979. Of course, it wasn’t on a phone. To be online I had to be at the LA 36 terminal in my dormitory.

In 1981, I had a job as a computer operator for the EPA, backing up PDP-11 data onto reel-to-reel tapes and swapping out Bundt-cake sized hard disk arrays that contained… five megabytes. By 1985 I had a job as a business manager, with a 640K RAM i80186 [yes, 80186] PC clone running DOS 3.1 with a 30 MB hard drive.

In 1995 I designed and built my first website for Natural MicroSystems. I spent most of the next quarter century designing and building custom web applications for in-house use by Intel, PGE, Vestas, Nike, FEI, and Radisys. I have been a full stack engineer, which means the back end SQL database, the front end user interface, and the middleware connecting the two.

While certainly not global in breadth, my knowledge and experience of programming is as deep as it gets.  One upside is that my critical thinking and logic skills are rock-solid: computers always do exactly what you TELL them to do. The challenge is getting them to do what you WANT them to do. Logic has not changed in the last 50 years; if-then-else reasoning is the heartbeat of all computer code.

The core of  database design, normalization, has been around since the early 90s. So have object oriented design, HTML, and JavaScript. There are constantly new layers of abstraction and new class libraries that automate some previously hand-coded functionality and use increasing CPU and storage capabilities, allowing higher and higher levels of custom programming although the added complexity can be a challenge to manage. The art, the hard work, is getting computers to do what you WANT them to do. Computers are relentlessly logical. One downside is that all the time I have spent on a computer has made me hypersensitive to ambiguity, even when I’m away from the computer talking to other people, sometimes annoying them with too many questions to clarify and ease my anxiety.

When designing anything, we always started with problem definition, involving all stakeholders to ensure that all relevant issues were on the table to be scoped and prioritized in time and money. We documented what we did, rigorously tested it, and rolled it out.

I got an AOL account in 1994. While I didn’t get a cell phone until 2008, a Blackberry,  I have had an Android phone for the last several years, currently a V16, 5G phone that I got last year. It has an incredible, Star Trek range of features in its hardware and software:  64 GB storage, phone, camera, calculator, radio receiver, maps & GPS, clock, translator, web browser, tuner & metronome, and myriad other applications to manage my banking, Meetup hikes, and Trailblazers season tickets. But by default it updates all the apps in the background, unannounced, with minimal documentation, if any, about new features. A consequence is that often an app I’ve been using for months or years rearranges its features, or deletes them. I have to spend time, often at inopportune moments, figuring out how to do something  that I already knew how to do in the app. I’m having to run faster and faster to stay in place. If I turn off the automatic updates, I get annoying pop-ups urging me to upgrade until the old version is de-supported and fails to work altogether. While a long-term problem, the upgrade cycle is the software version of pebbles in your shoes – annoying, but rarely causing serious harm. It does take mindshare, though, that used to be spent elsewhere in real life.