And All That Before Noon

Who am I? Nobody special really. Just a software engineer with almost 40 years of experience. I don't have any kind of formal education in business, human resources, or career development. I have a couple years of experience as a first level manager for a software team, and I've been the technical lead on a few projects over the years. I appreciate all the managers and companies that have given me opportunities and placed me in situations where I could learn and grow. The lessons weren't always easy, but those were often the most impactful.

My high school electives and initial college trajectory were in the field of architecture - the architecture required for designing and building buildings, not the software flavor. If you ask me what I remember about my computer science related courses, I’ll tell you stories about Pascal and hauling punch cards around campus. My early career also included such trailblazing technologies as magnetic core memory, the Mortran programming language, and Xerox Star computers. Going from there to Scaled Agile Frameworks, the Atlassian tools, and C# programming in Visual Studio has been quite a journey.

I’ve worked for three major defense contractors - Lockheed Martin, The Boeing Company, and BAE Systems. I’ve also spent some time with other more commercial businesses ranging from pcOrder.com to NI (National Instruments), and I've developed products for industries such as back-office support and oil and gas drilling. I’ve worked for companies ranging in size from less than 100 to over 100,000. I think that variety gives me a unique perspective on the software industry.

At this point in my career, I feel like I should take the time to share some of my experiences and observations with the next generations. I refuse to call it the twilight of my career. That makes it sound like I'm slowly fading away. I feel like I'm still learning and growing. I plan to keep it that way. I want to retire at noon, the peak of my career, rather than twilight.

I expect the topics of this newsletter to be just as diverse as my career. I hope some of you discover nuggets here and there that you find useful. Subscribe to get a notification when I publish a new article. Perhaps my musings will spark some discussions that will benefit us both.