I have programmed and there's pretty good odds that you've been impacted by some of my code.
I'm sorry about that. I did hire many competent coders. They pretty much hated my code. They eventually re-wrote it all in C++ (I'd done it in C) and took away my admin rights. I'm not kidding. They made my account a regular user account so that I couldn't commit to prod and couldn't overwrite anything in the repo.
In my defense, we had a bar and pool table in the back.
sighs
I listened to 'em, 'cause that's why I'd hired them. Still, it was a kick in the ego to have them come to me and say that they'd decided to strip my admin rights away from my own code base.
I comment EVERYTHING! Sometimes, my comments are longer than the code!
oh yeah I used to comment just to be able to understand wtf the code was doing in each and every step... we didn't get much formal training in how to structure things, or elegance
I had one (just one) formal semester in C. We were expected to pick it up as we went along and this was a long time ago. I did my defense almost exactly 27 years ago. By then, I'd already started on our first contract. Yup... I had my first contract before I'd defended my dissertation.
Times were a bit different back then. I just happened to be in the right place and time. I worked with Dr. Lorenz during my undergrad and that's what piqued my interest in Chaos Theory. I knew I wanted to find something else to apply it to, and traffic data just happened to be plentiful and free. It also was timed at just the right point where the price for compute cycles dropped as they became more powerful and ubiquitous.
To make it even better, MA was in the planning stages for a big project. A politician promised that they'd not stop traffic during the construction. That meant constant modeling for ever-changing plans. It was lucrative and enabled near-immediate expansion.
That kinda sums up my whole life. It's been pretty much dumb luck and a willingness to just say to hell with it and go all in. I tend to throw myself at stuff with great passion and I certainly worked hard - but I didn't work as hard as a guy who lugs concrete forms. I know, 'cause I spent a summer lugging concrete forms. Fuck that.
(post is archived)