Thirty-four Years in IT - Instructor, Machinist, CNC and CAD/CAM (Part 1)

As I've now ended 34+ years of public service, I'm going to burn a few posts on where I've been and what I've tried to accomplish.

Like many people my age, my path toward a career in technology was non-linear. My first stop after a Baccalaureate in Physics was a move into teaching Machine Tool trades at a 2-year college. Make sense, right? Actually I had taken a few programming courses in college (FORTRAN, Pascal, PDP-8 Assembler, SNOBOL, FORTH), had worked my way through college as a machinist, and taught myself how to program CNC machines. So the trade school route wasn't too much of a stretch.

On aging (software)

I’m looking at an old (early 20th century) hand-crank record player that was handed down to me from my great-grandmother. It’s a simple wooden box with a spring & flywheel mechanism that spins the turntable at a somewhat constant speed, a metal needle that rides in the grooves of a record disk and transmits the vibrations onto a small metal drum, and a big metal horn that focuses the sound from the drum and directs it out into the room. The power source is a human winding a spring. The sound and amplification are purely mechanical.

It’s simple. If it breaks you can take it apart, look at what’s inside, and with just a bit of tinkering you’ll probably get it to work again. If it somehow survives a few thousand years, the people from that era will look at it, figure out what is is supposed to do and with a bit of tinkering it’ll be made to work again. If one were to draw the mechanicals out on archival paper, a person from the future would be able to create a functioning replica using only late 19th/early 20th century technology.

Blog: Resurrect or Die?

This blog has been idle since 2012. Does anyone care?

Like many, I let this blog die. I think that’s happened for a variety of reasons, both personal and professional.

Relevance: Most of what I was posting was clearly not going to make any difference to myself or anyone else. Posts that announce [random software] has [random vulnerability] could just as well have been machine generated. The state of software security is at best, marginally better than it was a handful of years ago, and some random guy blogging about it isn’t gong to change that.

A few posts were and are still relevant. No matter what I do, I’ll maintain access to those.

Burnout: Having more than one open Oracle Sev 1’s per team member was brutal. We were in a situation where a small handful of us were working a seven-day pace for months. A few months of that and I was more than ready to back off from my immersion in technology and recuperate a bit. Hobbies got more interesting, and being able to disconnect from 24x7 operational responsibilities was essential.

Chaos: Having multiple layers of leadership turnover simultaneously created a work environment that was unpredictable and chaotic. Uncertainty affected staff moral, working environment went from stressful but fun, to simply stressful. I got a new boss, and along with that a significant job change.

Blogging is dead: Of the hundred-odd  blogs that were in my RSS feed, only a handful are being maintained. The center of gravity has shifted. I miss following bloggers – as well formed, thoughtful ‘long form’ writing still interests me far more than short, disconnected 140 character messages.

So – let die gracefully, resurrect, or something in between?

--Mike