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Thank you, this is a wonderful post! Please share more of your story. (Write a book, please). I would love to hear answers to the following: 1. What ideas pro

Thank you, this is a wonderful post! Please share more of your story. (Write a book, please). I would love to hear answers to the following: 1. What ideas proved useful throughout your career, and what ideas did you change your mind about? 2. What are your hobbies? Do you still program in your spare time - if so, what? Or do you find other outlets? 3. What went into the decision to go back to school? Did you get the PhD? If not, did you get burned out, or what lured you away? 4. What were the Big Ideas in software over your career that didn't work out? Any that were better than expected? 5. General successes/regrets/advice for these readers!

lisper 6y ago
Not the OP but I got my first programming job as a junior in high school in 1980 so I've been at it for 40 years. If that's good enough, here are my answers: > What ideas proved useful throughout your career Learning Lisp. I got an enormous amount of leverage out of that, and still do (I'm more or less retired, but I have a nice little Lisp consulting gig at the moment). > what ideas did you change your mind about? Before Lisp I thought BASIC was pretty cool (old-school BASIC, with line numbers). I was pretty down on Python when I first encountered it but now I'm a fan. > What are your hobbies? I like to hike, bike, ski, travel, fly airplanes, free dive and ride flowriders. I also write a blog. > Do you still program in your spare time - if so, what? Yes, but not very much. The last big project I did was writing the firmware for this product: https://sc4.us/hsm https://sc4.us/hsm and the e-commerce system I use to sell it. That was quite a while ago. > Did you get the PhD? Yes, because I thought I wanted to be a college professor. Turns out that's not what I wanted, but I'm still glad I did it. But it's not for everyone. It really depends on what you want out of life. Do it because you love research. Don't do it as a means to some other end. It takes way too many of the best years of your life to do it for anything other than its own sake. > What were the Big Ideas in software over your career that didn't work out? Any that were better than expected? I've seen a zillion software fads come and go. UML. XML. ISO whatever the fuck it was back in 2000 or so. The vast majority of popular things in the software world are bullshit. The world keeps re-inventing s-expressions with different syntax. Very little has turned out better than expected, though Rust and webassembly look pretty cool. If I were going to do another deep dive into something today it would probably be one of those two things. > General successes/regrets/advice for these readers! The world today is awash with computational wealth beyond the wildest dreams of my youth. Take advantage of it. Get a Raspberry pi and noodle around with it. Bring up a web server, an email server, a DNS server. If you're really feeling ambitious, write your own, or write a game. Build a Linux kernel from source. Design your own programming language and write a compiler for it, even if it's just a minor riff on something that already exists. None of these things are particularly hard [1], and the things you will learn and the empowerment you will feel by doing them are priceless. [1] The hard part of programming is not getting things to work, the hard part is getting things to work well enough for someone else to want to use use.
mindfulgeek 6y ago
https://www.infoq.com/presentations/developer-aging/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/developer-aging/
genedangelo 6y ago
That's a lot of questions, but let me take a couple. I got my Master's degrees in the early 1970's, when we used something called a "slide rule". In 1990 I went back to school to update my skills and expand my knowledge into artificial intelligence, which I had become enamored with. Unfortunately, I didn't finish my PhD (big mistake!) because in 1995 I jumped on an opportunity to join a company that had this amazing software that enabled very advanced analytics on big data (except it wasn't called "big data" back then). The software was called HOPS (for Heuristic Optimized Processing System) and I still use it today to develop custom machine learning applications among other things. I went back to school again in 2016 to fill in some gaps so would qualify as a real "data scientist" - the latest craze. I will say that HOPS was and is the biggest idea in software that hasn't worked out - at least not commercially. It's a system that is great for data scientists working on big data and enables them to do their own programming with minimal effort. I'm still hoping HOPS will take it's deserved place in the world of software development. It will be a great loss if it doesn't! It's one reason I'm holding on - to prove the exceptional things that it enables and prevent it from being tossed into the trash bin of history.
- bayonetz 6y ago
  Looked up “HOPS (for Heuristic Optimized Processing System)” but didn’t find any good direct hits. Can you point me to some good starting points?
- gfodor 6y ago
  Why do you regret not finishing your PhD? I’ve gotten mixed reviews on if the effort was worth it for those I know who did it.
- dang 6y ago
  Is HOPS something that could be discussed publicly on HN? are there sources and examples that people could look at? If so, we could arrange some sort of thread about it.
- warmfuzzykitten 6y ago
  This? https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20081114005550/en/TRAP-Systems-HOPS-Introduces-New-Software-as-a-Service-Platform https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20081114005550/en/TRA...

lisper 6y ago

Not the OP but I got my first programming job as a junior in high school in 1980 so I've been at it for 40 years. If that's good enough, here are my answers: > What ideas proved useful throughout your career Learning Lisp. I got an enormous amount of leverage out of that, and still do (I'm more or less retired, but I have a nice little Lisp consulting gig at the moment). > what ideas did you change your mind about? Before Lisp I thought BASIC was pretty cool (old-school BASIC, with line numbers). I was pretty down on Python when I first encountered it but now I'm a fan. > What are your hobbies? I like to hike, bike, ski, travel, fly airplanes, free dive and ride flowriders. I also write a blog. > Do you still program in your spare time - if so, what? Yes, but not very much. The last big project I did was writing the firmware for this product: https://sc4.us/hsm https://sc4.us/hsm and the e-commerce system I use to sell it. That was quite a while ago. > Did you get the PhD? Yes, because I thought I wanted to be a college professor. Turns out that's not what I wanted, but I'm still glad I did it. But it's not for everyone. It really depends on what you want out of life. Do it because you love research. Don't do it as a means to some other end. It takes way too many of the best years of your life to do it for anything other than its own sake. > What were the Big Ideas in software over your career that didn't work out? Any that were better than expected? I've seen a zillion software fads come and go. UML. XML. ISO whatever the fuck it was back in 2000 or so. The vast majority of popular things in the software world are bullshit. The world keeps re-inventing s-expressions with different syntax. Very little has turned out better than expected, though Rust and webassembly look pretty cool. If I were going to do another deep dive into something today it would probably be one of those two things. > General successes/regrets/advice for these readers! The world today is awash with computational wealth beyond the wildest dreams of my youth. Take advantage of it. Get a Raspberry pi and noodle around with it. Bring up a web server, an email server, a DNS server. If you're really feeling ambitious, write your own, or write a game. Build a Linux kernel from source. Design your own programming language and write a compiler for it, even if it's just a minor riff on something that already exists. None of these things are particularly hard [1], and the things you will learn and the empowerment you will feel by doing them are priceless. [1] The hard part of programming is not getting things to work, the hard part is getting things to work well enough for someone else to want to use use.

mindfulgeek 6y ago

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/developer-aging/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/developer-aging/

genedangelo 6y ago

That's a lot of questions, but let me take a couple. I got my Master's degrees in the early 1970's, when we used something called a "slide rule". In 1990 I went back to school to update my skills and expand my knowledge into artificial intelligence, which I had become enamored with. Unfortunately, I didn't finish my PhD (big mistake!) because in 1995 I jumped on an opportunity to join a company that had this amazing software that enabled very advanced analytics on big data (except it wasn't called "big data" back then). The software was called HOPS (for Heuristic Optimized Processing System) and I still use it today to develop custom machine learning applications among other things. I went back to school again in 2016 to fill in some gaps so would qualify as a real "data scientist" - the latest craze. I will say that HOPS was and is the biggest idea in software that hasn't worked out - at least not commercially. It's a system that is great for data scientists working on big data and enables them to do their own programming with minimal effort. I'm still hoping HOPS will take it's deserved place in the world of software development. It will be a great loss if it doesn't! It's one reason I'm holding on - to prove the exceptional things that it enables and prevent it from being tossed into the trash bin of history.

bayonetz 6y ago
Looked up “HOPS (for Heuristic Optimized Processing System)” but didn’t find any good direct hits. Can you point me to some good starting points?
gfodor 6y ago
Why do you regret not finishing your PhD? I’ve gotten mixed reviews on if the effort was worth it for those I know who did it.
dang 6y ago
Is HOPS something that could be discussed publicly on HN? are there sources and examples that people could look at? If so, we could arrange some sort of thread about it.
warmfuzzykitten 6y ago
This? https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20081114005550/en/TRAP-Systems-HOPS-Introduces-New-Software-as-a-Service-Platform https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20081114005550/en/TRA...