Old Dog, New Tricks

I have been a technology nut for as long as I can remember. In my adult working life, I have always been employed in a tech position or tech has been a major part of my employment, save a brief 8 year detour into public service. My story is probably not all that unique. I am sure that the low level details are very different, but paths still similar. I have been learning new tricks over the last few months and thought I would share some of it here to offer whatever it may provide; inspiration, motivation, maybe just a read to pass the time.

I guess you could say I’m an “old timer” as far as the field goes today. I wrote code on a TI-99–4A and a Commodore 64 in my formative years. We had Tandy computers in high school running BASIC (which were probably ancient even then). After high school, I went off to the regional university to study engineering. Even there, the computer lab was a room full of terminals connected to the university mainframe. I could only do pre-engineering for 2 years at this university and then I would have to transfer to a larger university to complete my degree.

Between my first two years of college, I started checking into military service in the form of the US Army National Guard to help pay for college. I wound up completing the first semester of my second year before being sent off to training. The plan all along was to go through training, get accustomed to my guard unit and then get back into school. Well, it didn’t quite work out that way…I was deployed on active duty within two months of graduating Basic Training and Advanced Training. This delayed my return to school by another year.

After returning from active duty and foreign lands, school was the last thing on my mind. Engineering school seemed like it had been years before. Being a fit, fresh military man, I was offered a job as a patrol officer for a local police department. I took the job and didn’t look back. About 4 years into my “career” as a police officer though, my tech geek inner self started tugging at me again. By this time, cellular phones were gaining widespread use, the internet was becoming a huge deal and it all sucked me back in. Actually, Slackware Linux sucked me back to the tech side…

I am a person that tends to consume every possible source of information on any subject I am interested in. Slackware was one of those things. I think I first got a copy of it on a cd in the back of a Slackware Linux book. I installed it, kicked it around and became pretty proficient at it. At about the same time, a guy I had befriended, the owner of the local computer shop/Internet Service, took notice. His network admin, a local high school kid, had moved off to college and he needed someone to handle the network…Voila…I was hired in as a part time network admin. I went to full time status and left the police department within a couple of years and was named as V.P. for Internet Operations. When I eventually left, we had somewhere around 5,000 customers and 5 offices.

That was the beginning…skipping forward to today, my official title is System Technology Coordinator for a power company. There is a lot of story in between that first job and this one, but I could write a book on those details. Needless to say, Network Administrator has kind of been my thing all of these years. I have done quite a bit of software development through the years. Automation with things like Perl, Python and Bash have been staples in my daily routine. I had gone through books on C and C++, but never really put any of it to use. In a previous job, I did quite a bit of C# .NET development for both desktop and Win Mobile 5 and 6 devices. This was a lot of fun and I did enough of it to be considered a veteran, but by no means an expert.

At some point in my current position, I decided I needed a Mac. I manage quite a few servers and network resources…a mix of Windows Server as well as Linux, Cisco routers and switches, etc. The thought of having a nice shiny MacBook Pro daily driver with the beautiful unix terminal was extremely appealing to me. Of course I own just about every type of Apple device anyway, so why not, right?

I had been hearing quite a bit about Apple’s shiny new programming language Swift. One day while browsing around Udemy, I ran across a course taught by Mark Price — iOS 9 and Swift 2: From beginner to paid professional. I read a review in which the student seemed so enthusiastic about it, that I bought it right then and there. Boy was that a good decision. As I said, I tend to consume everything I can on subjects I am interested in. This course grabbed me by the shirt and hasn’t let go yet. He is one of the best practical, no B.S. teachers I have ever studied under. I learned more quickly in this online course than in any other medium that I have ever tried.

Mark has built an extremely active community in the form of a community website and chat room. I help out as much as possible with questions in the chat room and actually had the privilege of being the first moderator on his new platform. More recently, Mark decided that he wanted to make an app for his learning experience. He enlisted me and two other developers from the course to help him and decided to just put it all out there in the form of live as well as recorded meetings, coding sessions, code reviews and planning sessions. This is truly a “startup reality series”. We are just one week in, but with the level of excitement around it so far, I really think awesome things are to come…I can’t thank Mark enough for being such a great influence on me and all of the others he has helped and will continue to help along the way.