Trials of the Novice Programmer Part 1 (Intro)

After 30 years or more I am still a novice programmer.

I know this intro is somewhat boring but I will get to code.

My primary core proficiency is Electronics, I can design, layout, build and troubleshoot fairly well.

My first programming was Basic on a Timex-Sinclair 2068 and one of the projects was to get the Waggener FFT to run on it, which I did. Still got the code somewhere.

Obviously, I survived all the iterations of Basic. But I never did anything to solve problems with the scraps of what I learned. That came later.

I have just enough dyslexia that transposing critical data from O’scopes and Spec-Ans was becoming problematic while working for Intel in one of its analog validation labs.

We had tons of equipment including VB6 and National Instruments, all of our instrumentation had IEEE-488 interfaces so I took the time to learn how to collect the data my testing developed and format it on a tabbed delimited form to import into Excel and give to my engineer.

Years later, I was still using VB though I also written some stuff in dBase III+.

In fact I leveraged the coding I did at Intel to automate my Calibration Procedures while working at a Cal lab.

I felt pretty good about my coding skills. Then I got a rather painful and rude awakening moving to a GS position writing code in ATLAS (a real sucky language) testing military test gear.

First slap, what you don’t do Linux???? You’re no programmer!!!!

What???? Your primary experience is VB6????? You’re not a programmer!!!!

So, my boss graciously moved me over to the engineering team.

I had a Government Computer which I couldn’t do anything on. But I was able to kludge together a passable dev station and they had enrolled me in MSDN, So I had access to Visual Studio, though I was still a Windows Prisoner at the time.

One of the things I really wanted was a desktop clock so I learned Python and QT (which I’ve promptly forgotten) and made a desktop clock which I still use.

 It has a few bugs, but, hey it’s all mine! J

I started coding in C# and wrote a few solutions for work and they did they desired job.

I wrote a Family Finances program that uses M$ Excel as it data base. I had taken one look at SQL and SQLite and even mySQL and they scared the living daylights out of me. So, I stayed with M$ Excel.

Now with M$ becoming more and more the bully and with Windows 10 about to be obsoleted so I got serious about moving to Linux, Completely.

 (I am fully retired and I get pretty frustrated when people talk about throwing perfectly good stuff away because it is old… like me)

I had set up a Linux Box to run PLEX and also use SAMBA as a NAS. I wimped out and went with Mint.

So where does this leave me. Well there is some music software I use that will require, at least in the short term Windows, and they will end up not being Networked.

But, the biggest problem is I am not will to recode my Financial Program for Open Office, hey look my brain is pretty full already and after 3 heart attacks, I don’t want to waste time learning a whole new way of doing things.

So I am learning SQLite under C# and, hopefully, will be able to move it to MONO and Linux before M$ pulls the rug out.

Questions & Comments myrrhhouseof2[at]gmail.com

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