09 March, 2010

The Greying of an Engineer

My birthday is upon me once again, this time in 11 minutes from the time that I compose this brief entry.  As I contemplate what the next year holds for me I find myself having certain realisations floating around my head.  I will attempt to share these with little fanfare and leave interpretations to the reader.

1. Throughout my entire life thus far, one item has remained a constant:  I love to design software and have since I was in the single digit age range.

2. The reason I'm not a horribly rich coder is simply because my goal has never been that of becoming rich, whereas it has been that of writing great code.

3. There are is a lot of talent out there, but it has nothing to do with youth vs. older coders.

4. New methodologies come and go all of the time.  Functional vs. Object Oriented paradigms, Low Level vs. High Level languages, Waterfall vs. Agile development.  All are capable, all can be utilised in effective manners, it simply comes down to competence and compatibility of those involved.

5. You can teach an old dog new tricks, though after having learned said new trick(s), one might still prefer the original. (e.g. I think that jQuery is a wonderful invention, but don't expect me to use it as I feel it isn't explicitly clear.  I'll take document.getElementById('idname') anyday over perl/rubyesque tokens.

Given that my goal was to post this before my birthday comes, I'm ending it abruptly here.  Till my next post.. -Eric

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