The Art of Code
Having a Successful Career in Software Development.
As I round the bend towards the end of a long and positive career as a software developer, I’d like to share some lessons learned in the past 40 years. (Buckle up, it isn’t all pretty.)
In the summer of 1980, my best friend in high school — who coincidentally is also named Kevin — was tasked by our school principal to learn something about computers. To accomplish this, Kevin had been granted possession of our school’s ONLY computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80 that was purchased before the end of the prior school year. During that summer, in the scant few breaks he had working on his family’s farm, my friend — who, in retrospect is literally a bona fide genius — read some magazine articles, typed in hundreds (possibly thousands?) of lines of BASIC code — and bent the machine to his will.
As for me, I found the process interesting, but not nearly as interesting as playing music with my band or trying to convince some sweet young thing I was a rock star in the making. (Spoiler alert: not even close.) But Kevin’s excitement about the computer was infectious. He’d show up at my house with magazines containing pages and pages of code or something he had created or the…
