The universe has an uncanny way of rewinding… — A few weeks ago, I woke up one morning with Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” on my mind. Had it been in my dreams? I couldn’t remember. Yet, hours later with this earworm drilling into my brain, I had no choice but to listen to the track. “Hey Google, play Valerie by…

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.) — Rob Reiner’s 1987 movie masterpiece has an enormous number of quotable lines. Perhaps you remember these? “I am not left-handed.” “Your friend is ‘mostly dead’. There’s a difference between ‘mostly dead’ and ‘all dead’.”

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.) — If you work in software development long enough, eventually you’re going to get handed thousands of lines of someone else’s code with the task of making a “simple” change. However, to properly make this change, you’ll first have to understand the existing code so that whatever you do to it…

From my earliest memory of grade school through graduation through high school, my friend Burton was always right by my side. Witty, fun, reliable, Burt was always nearby when I needed a friend. We lost track of each other when I left for college, but we reconnected briefly when he…

Coming home to a place I’d never been before. — In the early 1940’s, I remember coming home to the house on Third Street in Sandusky, Ohio. Having recently served in the war, it was nice to be home, even if it was just a brief leave. I couldn’t wait to get out of my travel uniform and just lay…

The news sucked today. Again. — Earlier today I sat down to write a technical article, outlining another of the many lessons learned in four decades of software development. However, the words would not flow. It felt like my mind was being pulled elsewhere. Putting that article aside, I spent some time searching my soul to…

In the 1980’s the college I attended had this room-sized computer system. Each night they would back up the hard drives onto magnetic tape, and it was my job to load the tape. Fortunately for me — and the college — the job was pretty hard to mess up. This…

A Republican politician in Texas said something stupid. This unto itself is not newsworthy. I mean, this is the state that sent Ted Cruz to the senate and the state allowing the governor to overturn free and fair elections. No, “stupid” and “leadership” mean the same thing in the one-star…

Reflecting back on four decades of software development, there have been many hard lessons learned. This was the first. — After graduating college in 1984, it was difficult to find a job in software development. The field was in its infancy and with scores of talented kids coming out of college with programming degrees, competition was fierce. Keep in mind, this was years before cell phones and the internet as…