Yeah, I 'm a programmer too. Curious how much overlap there is with musical types.
Taught myself Fortran, Calcomp plotting, PL/I, 370 Assembler - after graduating college with a liberal arts degree and washing floors for the first summer (no regrets, I'd do the same thing again).
Spent about 10 years doing mainframe OS support and development (VM/370, VM/XA, and something similar at an IBM-compatible mainframe company named Amdahl, subsequently swallowed up by Fujitsu).
Yes, I touched some VTAM stuff a few times, wrote channel programs/device drivers for the Xerox 9700 laser printer when they first came out, and some other obscure things - but *never* wrote a COBOL program, and was glad there was someone else to handle the MVS and VS/1 stuff, while I got to focus on VM :-) (Just having fun, some of you will appreciate the context)
Took a full ten year hiatus from actual coding (mostly because I couldn't be bothered with C and C++ - just like Java, but with memory corruption), and acted as architect/tech lead on some large client-server projects.
Then, while working for a small startup, picked up a couple of books on Java, and have been coding that for about 8 years, with much emphasis on custom UI stuff (Swing), but also lots of relational and multidimensional database access work.
If this is starting to sound like a resume... Well, that startup has been gobbled up twice so far (unfortunately, without any windfalls that would let me get out of this crazy business), and there's some chance it will happen again within a year or so, and I'm simply not equipped to work at a company like Oracle or SAP.
In real life, I've been a loyal Macintosh advocate since before they were officially announced, and I've done all my development work on them for years now, despite the fact that the company I work for doesn't officially support them.
One has to have some standards, after all. It can't all be about the money...
-Bob
