As my birthday approaches and as I’m nearing 31, I was reading about Software Developers on their 40s up and found this interesting article.
I witnessed how my father wrote programs when I was young. He would blankly stare at his laptop for minutes, writing things, then deleting them, repeat & rinse. I thought it was stupid. He would also tell me to “give me that <color> book with a name <title and version>” or “return this back to the 2nd shelf, 3rd from the left.” He was very particular with the order and placement of his books.
Those were the days when the Internet was still not available (1994 in the PH). I can’t image programming without an online manual/reference. I then understood he was doing freelance programming work for FICCO (a small cooperative in my hometown) on their inventory system. I think it was written in Delphi and Foxpro.
When he was near retirement, I would still see him reading and printing ebooks about Python and Joomla. I hope he would still find time to code now that he’s retired at 63. Right now his hobbies are binge watching on his 40″ TV, downloading 1080p movies, playing with his O(n!) cats at home (there are always new kittens every time i go home >.<).
Moving forward, I realized that programming is indeed a stupid job. You write codes, you delete codes, your program doesn’t work and you don’t know why, it works and you still don’t know why. Haha. Of course, it’s a joke. Coding is <3.