[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I must not read things such as these. They make me wish I was born in 1960. Then I would have lived through all the good computer stuff, and I would now be much closer to retirement.

What the good computer stuff is is generational. You can find old timers who think it was when you programmed on the bare metal, possibly by inserting patches in octal. Never mind those namby-pamby assembler mnemonics.

I caught the last whiff of it, because I started on a very old XT in 1990, running DOS 3.2, and later 5.0, with only two 720 KB disk drives. So, I worked like it was te 70's or 80's until 1994. Then I was thrust into modern computing with OS/2 3.0, and later Windows NT.

I began on IBM mainframes when MSDOS 2.1 on the original IBM PC was first appearing on corporate desks as an engine to run Lotus 1,2,3. I worked my way across and down through DEC minis and Unix supermicros, and in recent years it's been Windows, Solaris, and Linux, on servers and desktops.

I got into it by accident. I was variously a graphic designer/print production guy, structural and ornamental metal worker, museum exhibit builder/maintainer, and solar energy analyst before becoming a computer geek. I'd moved to NYC from Philadelphia for love and for better opportunities in the design field. The love didn't work out. I temped for a while when I was looking for design gigs, and found myself at a bank helping a financial guy deal with backlogged paperwork. He decided I was useful, and started handing me things he didn't want to deal with, which were mostly dealing with the bank's mainframe. Five years later I was tech support for my area of the bank and liaison who went to DP and said "This is what the users think they want. Let's talk about what they really need and what you can do to help." I was the translator who spoke both languages.

The bank ran one of everything made, and I defined my job as "If it's a computer, I get to play with it." I got a liberal education in computer systems, finance, and the workings of large corporations.

Next stop was a small Unix systems house owned by card-carrying Scientologists, who knew everything (they thought) about L. Ron Hubbard, and nothing about the business they were in. There have been other stops on the way, and I've logged time on systems many folks have never heard of. But it was all a matter of being tossed into the deep end of a pool and learning to swim.

That love of the old, hardcore CS stuff never went away though.

My education was Computer Science, with a specialisation in (very low level) programming of micro controllers because of the love of the hardcore stuff, but nowadays, I'm often writing HTML/CSS, and trying to understand the latest Javascript framework / library fad.

(I have just written an entire rant about that some pages back... the one that got this entire thing started )

Yesterday and today, I've spend over a day to get a fracking user interface right, to show it at least somewhat similar in the major browsers (IE 11, Firefox and Chrome on the desktop, Safari on iOS, and Chrome/Android Browser and Firefox on Android).

An old friend is a former print designer who works in online design now. He was grumpy back when about the rising popularity of Firefox, because he was accustomed to just making it work in IE and forgetting about it. I told him he had it the wrong way around. IE was the least standards compliant browser (though it's better now.) He needed to get it right in Firefox, then go back and add work-arounds for IE's stupidity.

Currently he's unhappy because Flash is increasingly deprecated and the world is going HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript.

I sympathize, but one of the reasons people are moving the HTML5 is the <video> keyword, which will let you embed video without using Flash. You'll still need a codec for the video, but it will be part of the browser, not a third-party plugin. Increasingly, browser development has the attitude that plugins are bad, and the user should be able to do everything without resorting to them. I'll be delighted when Flash goes away. Mozilla implemented a plugin-helper in their products that runs as a child process, and provides a sandbox in which plugins can run, so a crashing plugin doesn't take the browser down with it. Flash was a primary reason why they did it.

A friend of mine, who is a front-end developer, could have probably done this in less than one day, and add jQuery transitions, slides, and other shizzle-wizzle to make it really smooth and blitzy. Or he would have used Bootstrap or something, which costs too much time to get into right now.

I can't. I'm just happy when the UI looks logical, somewhat decent, and works without problems.

Then, the data ends up at the server, in the backend and that's where I live. I write the stuff nobody ever sees.

A friend is in a position analogous to yours, doing devops for a startup. I was around when he got a call about the desire to do an online demo, but the machine the demo would be on was not online. He said "If you want to bend over and moon the Internet, do X, but we need to have an architecture meeting, because the machine you are doing this with is not currently set up to be online and secure."

He has a front end designer whose code would be demoed on the machine. He said you tell him what you want the front end to look like, and he'll give you one that does that, well designed and working as intended. But infrastructure stuff like security on the back end his code will connect to is someone else's problem. That's entirely reasonable, and it should be someone else's problem, but you must have that someone else and everybody needs to talk to each other.

I juggle data as if it's made of sushi, eating a piece every so often (hey... I do that with the rolls that fail, you know... so I eat invalid data as well). Analyzing it, transforming it, doing whatever the frack you want with it, saving it on disk and/or database... no problem. Done in a jiffy.

I believe Unix developer Rob Pike (at Google these days) said something like "The essence of programming isn't your algorithms, it's your data structures." I think he's quite right. One of the things I've done over the years is get data out of one format and into another for the benefit of programs that expect to see it differently than the form it's currently in.

That same friend who can make the blitzy user interfaces was a colleague of mine some time ago, and we have 'helped' each other to meet deadlines.

Let's just say he doesn't want my help on UI's because they look like a work straight out of the 80's. I haven't the knowledge to make them glitzy and modern; I have to go look up everything. So while I *could* do it, it would be very time consuming.

Similarly, I don't want his help on the backend/data part... although if "crashing" was a requirement, I would. Crashing the application is the main perk of his backend code. He forgets half of the code, or just doesn't have the knowledge on how to do it right; just as I don't have it for doing nice UI's fast.

He writes front-ends, and does that very well.
I write back-ends and/or algorithms, and I do that very well.

Trying to swap our tasks results in either very ugly, or very crashy programs.

The issue tends to be keeping management from trying to swap your roles. (Or worse, consolidating them into one job that one person is expected to do. Can you say DevOps? )

The pity is, the user interface is the stuff people see. Therefore that guy has a nice portfolio that he can show to people, while I can only show pictures of systems I've written code for. Nothing to see here... it's all inside. If you *SEE* my code, you'll probably looking at some sort of crash dump.

I had discussions with co-workers in the past where I pointed out that if our stuff worked right, we were invisible. The system Just Worked. We only became visible when it failed. But we reported to non-technical people who didn't understand what was involved in making things Just Work, and it was on us to educate them about what was involved, especially when performance review time came around. Part of any success I had was being able to talk to management in terms they understood to educate them in what was involved.

I would probably have loved being in the computer science field in the 70's and 80's (the time without screens and proper keyboards might have been a bit too old even for me).

One of the things I've been fascinated by for a while is domain specific languages like SNOBOL. I looked at it, and a descendant called Icon by one of SNOBOL's designers, and have versions of both here. I'm currently looking at Lua, which is designed to be embedded as a scripting language in applications. Because of that, it's not stand-alone. It has no I/O facilities, for example, because it assumes the app it's embedded in will handle that. It's turning up in an increasing number of places.

The hardcore CS stuff you loved is back in fashion courtesy of the Internet of Things, with lots of embedded development done on that level.

One of the folks I follow is a chap named Dmitry Grinberg, who is at Google these days. I encountered him in the Palm OS world, where he did things like rip a version of Access Netfront (the closest to a usable browser on Palm devices) out of the Sony Clie line which embedded it, remove a device check, and package it as an installer for other Palm devices. (I have it on my TX.)

Dmitry got Linux to boot on an 8 bit Atmel processor. He did so by writing a hardware abstraction layer that would intercept ARM instructions and convert them to Atmel equivalents, then booted an ARM port of Linux. It took hours to work, but it would boot and technically run. I posted the link to a mailing list largely inhabited by techs, and got told "We have drugs for that now..."
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Dennis