How many hours a day can you write code, and at what point does the quality of your work go down? Even more important is how many weeks and months of that max effort you can still be effective.In my life, there have only been three periods where I
I make generative art with Swift and use tiling in many pieces. Truchet tiles are generally arranged randomly and contain everything appearing in the final image. What I do differently is to separate the layout of tiles from colorizing the image. I call this technique "Color-After Tiling."For
In the late 2000's, I worked at a niche MMO game company. We had a small team, not a lot of money, but a loyal audience. It was a game of skill without any of the usual powerups and unreality, and the players enjoyed the challenge.Then, one
Now that I am retired from programming for a living, I make generative art (not AI; see my post What Is Generative Art?) every day. I belong to a discord community of generative artists, yet I stick out because I am the only person using Swift as my chosen language.
I started my programming career in October 1981 at a large defense contractor (GD). At the time, my goal was to work for a couple of years and then continue my education with a Ph.D. in Chemistry (I had already been accepted).The office I worked in was a
I retired in 2021 at 63.5 after about four decades as a programmer. What made me do this was not failing ability in any way, but after a year of consideration, I realized I didn't care to do it anymore.Everyone will eventually reach a point at
So today, I decided to renew my driver's license online, like any modern person would.I started the process by going to my state's driver's license website. The first page is to verify my home and mail addresses. Since nothing changed, I hit "
Everyone hates Scrum, or at least it seems so, except for management.I did as well, but a difference is that I started my career in 1981, long before the hordes of Scrums took root.1981, you say, so you must have done Waterfall, so you are old and have
I'm starting a series on what I learned during my four decades as a working programmer. First, I will describe my experience of being interviewed.Interviews are part of being a programmer; every time you find a new job, you will go through interviews, which allow a prospective
Being retired after four decades as a programmer, there is nothing more irritating than seeing broken or poor functionality in web and mobile apps. I always cared about what we were putting out, even if it was sometimes unimportant to my employer. When I see things that are easy to
As I continue to recover from some health issues that kept me from writing, I thought it might be interesting to describe my long career with numbers. If you wind up working for four decades, your experience may vary.Years Active: 1981-2021, totaling 39.5 years. Irrespective of my title
Maury Markowitz wrote up the story of Trapeze (covered earlier in this blog) on Wikipedia.It sure seems like a long time ago.
I wrote my first single-page web app in Javascript in 2005, right after learning about XMLHttpRequest and before any serious frameworks existed. I left professional web development behind around 2009 (I started in 1997 with WebObjects) and spent the final decade of my career doing mobile.I look at the
In my four decades as a programmer, I've worked with hundreds of programmers, and I can say that no single type of person is good at programming.I've seen young people who could do amazing work and those without a clue. I've seen programmers
Code reviews can effectively improve code quality in large or mixed teams with experience differences. They can also be useless if not done correctly or if management does not support the time to do them.A code review is a modern invention, as the technology to do them easily did