A first web log entry. What am I doing here, and Why am I doing it… and maybe a bit of How I am doing it?

I am simultaneously enthused and disappointed by recently reading a large quantity of the most excellent www.joelonsoftware.com articles. I am also shamelessly trying out his company’s (Fog Creek) software CityDesk for this first page… [of course, the blog has now been moved to WordPress]

Enthused because so much of what he says makes a great deal of sense to me, and represent things that I would like to strive for… and…

Disappointed because I’m starting to feel like they are unavailable to me or, despite my previous comments, maybe they are just not me. What I mean by that is, he is just talking about a different branch of software development, and maybe I am simply not talented or experienced enough to do what he does.

Some of this will make more sense later.

So Now a bit about Me: Right now, I think of myself as a developer / programmer – which is odd because I have not done that for years – it is however what I would like to get back into. I had a reasonably good education, up to ‘A’ Levels (age 18 for anyone not in the UK). I lacked direction at that time, and started what I thought would be a ‘year off’ (before university) naively assuming somehow that the university would find me. It’s not that that is logical – normally I’m very logical – but well that’s what happened. Anyway, I soon found a job that was one of the luckiest (or worst) breaks in my life, in a local-authority-run computing company. I started as a grunt ‘Trainee Computer Operator’ and after that year, I was promoted to a Junior Operator role on shift work. We’re talking IBM mainframes here, massive printers printing thousands of documents and reports… and of course I was a junior so that meant a lot of work with printers, stationery, decollating multi-part stationery and so on – and not a massive amount of actual computer operation.

A year later, and I managed to get one of just two internally advertised, and oversubscribed, Trainee Programmer roles. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to tell that mainframe operations was probably not a growth future. But for me, it was more than that in any event. It had always been programming that interested me in the past, though I admit that it was not something that I had been able to consistently push since my Sinclair ZX Spectrum – Atari – Amiga days. Anyway, I got a great grounding in programming (IBM PL/I at that time) and went on to rise through the programming ranks quite rapidly. Ah, what I meant to say was – my skills rapidly increased and I became a well respected programmer rapidly – however this was just at the time that local authorities had stopped promoting anyone (from ‘automatic’ length-of-service based promotions). So, two years later I was still a Junior programmer working with teams that were almost entirely Senior programmers… and this really started to bite when we were asked to learn a new style of programming language (Pro-IV), which was somewhere near message-based programming. I well remember helping out one particular Senior programmer (who had been doing Pro-IV for a year) a couple of weeks after my Pro-IV course! I’m not saying I was a fantastic Pro-IV programmer here, just that I had the start of a recognition that my skills were more broadly based and flexible and that frankly, some of my colleagues had thought that mainframes were where it was at and where it was going to stay.

And so, it came to pass that my company, affected by shifts in the IT market and the general purchasing shenanigans of local authorities, set up a Unix team to run new Unix servers (Sequent and Pyramid if I recall) and new Unix / Oracle applications on them. I was selected to be the one Unix programmer reporting to a Senior programmer. I was very lucky to go on loads of courses to cover almost every aspect of Oracle RDBMS, and a few Unix related courses too. And thus my Unix / Oracle career path was born, and it primarily focused on batch-operations of ‘getting systems to work together’ – movement of data between systems with different file and DB formats etc.

Skip a few years and a couple of jobs. Having contracted in the City of London for two years – in one role – I decided I needed some time away from the City, and I ended up starting my own web-based company to sell ‘real’ things online for inkjet printers and photographers / artists. It was always going to be a niche market… I didn’t want ‘mass market’ appeal, but did want to be a respected player in the field. Four years later, and after a reasonably successful run overall, I decided to close the company. We were being bitten from a number of sides, and I had no desire to go the ‘box-shifting’ route that I felt had become our last chance to stay afloat. In fact, we did close having made a profit overall, but the signs were that things were going downhill enough such that making some really serious decisions became imperative. Anyhoo – I’ll probably talk more about this at some point in the future.

And so here I am. It is the end of August 2005. Yesterday, I arranged for what will probably be the last sale of old company stocks. I want to get back into IT. What next?

A Quick Word on CityDesk: I’m kind-of surprised to be here testing a web contribution program that is designed for end-users. Honestly I think that a few weeks ago I probably wouldn’t have seen the point for me. I’m certainly easily capable of developing my own web sites, typically using DreamWeaver as a front-end, and my raw html skills are ok-to-good and I can do a bit of PHP and such, and I have been truly converted to CSS (search for books by Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman). So why a simple web-contribution software? Well, we shall see, but it can take quite a lot of effort to set up the backbone of a blog style web site, and whilst I’m sure there are plenty of open-source / freeware type blogging solutions, I believe that most are probably web-based. I prefer a rich client, and right now I believe a simple Word-style interface may help me focus on getting the words on the page, rather than have that interspersed with html coding decisions! Put simply, CityDesk may be the simple framework for a blog that will make it easy and useful to use.