Hello, my name is Paul

I have never written a blog before. I’ve never had a blog, nor do I plan on blogging all the time. However, it is time. And, there are other people who make a living at blogging: I don’t think that’s me.

I love being hands on keyboard, and I do really love the hyperfocus in design and code. I love architecture, planning and documentation. I really do at this point love being a manager and working on strategy.

I love being an achiever, and most humbly, I do feel I am that.

I’m in reminiscence mode today, and I keep thinking about the first experiences I had with computers. And then I realized: it’s been almost forty years. Folks say time flies by, and I guess it does - but forty years feels like a long time.

If memory serves, it was summer in the UK at my cousin’s place in the midlands and we were playing a PC game about operating on patients. He’s a doctor now, so I guess it stuck! I remember that crummy green text on a sorta-dark background and the first DOS commands to “dir“ the directory and move forward. I was utterly fascinated and intimidated by it. You have to remember that this was the mid-80’s and personal computing was simple and archaic compared to today’s standards. Would it surprise you though, that after all this time I love the command line more than a GUI? I mean, unless it is rummaging through GitHub commits and fixing a shite merge from like a month ago that no one noticed till the repo got audited. I hate having to rebase. That is a boat load of headache.

My first “computer program“ was me drawing a picture of a bird on a Macintosh, by using their text editor and then “scripting“ (I didn’t know I was doing it TBH) between two images, one birdie wings up and birdie wings down, then pressing the enter key to flip between the two. Only two decades later did I realize it was an actual computer science thing-a-ma-bob that I just figured out. Not that I’m awesome or anything, just it made sense how the symbols worked. Press button, flappy wings. I was happy!

My father puchased a pretty nice Mac in the early 90’s and I devoured that thing. I looked at every program in the OS, every application and just kept teaching myself. I really knew Mac very well, and then in high-school I saw a course on computer science, feeling very confident that I could do what was asked. I knew the CLI, so I was ahead in the game, right?!

Then, came my introduction to the “culture shock“ of the windows PC. Nothing worked the same, had the same commands I had memorized (almost wrote memoized there, cause I’m a programmer) and when my teacher found out I was a Mac user - eek - my inevitable grade was an F. He would give out DOS instructions on a print out to have me type them into the command line. It’s fine, but it didn’t work. And, me being an absolutely jerk-wad Mac user pointed it out. Yep, F. F-minus-minus.

Honestly, I deserved it and I think that’s probably why I have this fire lit under me to always get an A++ in all the things IT anymore. Is that baggage? You betcha.

In the late 90’s, when I was playing music quite a bit I remember my first partner’s webpage “Chilly’s Choice“ built on an MS product I am forgetting the name of now. She had created this wonderful animated dog coming up and sniffing you on the page load. Page opens, puppy comes and gives you snuggles. Pure Joy. I was all in after that. Is it odd that I still use that as my benchmark for how successful a UI design is? I may have to think about that.

About that same time, I wrote a wrapper for a printer driver so I could make it work on our Dell. I found my first bug in production released code by a major vendor. I learned how to hack. Boy howdy, did I have to mature to become a really great engineer and developer. I’ve been on a journey, and I hope to reflect on that more with you here.

Taking a pause here, as I just realized I may be a blogger. I don’t know how I have just written as much as I did. I guess I have to break this into another post. Huh.

I’ll leave it here for now, best wishes and salutations friends! Remember to take a moment for yourself, and breathe. Don’t code tired!