Sat, 01 Oct 2005
I’ve worked as a computer programmer for about 11 years now. Actually, I should amend that. I’ve been called a computer programmer for 11 years, but for the past 3 years or so I’ve not done much actual coding. It seems that my employer sees me as a manager so I’ve been writing technical specifications, documenting test cases, working with server configurations, researching security options, dealing with gawd-aweful vendors and so on. In other words, doing a lot of stuff that has little, if anything to do with programming. Wow, I really need to do something to keep up my Geek street cred. Many years ago when I was in school (a subject for a future rant I assure you) I wrote a music teaching program. You could enter in a stringed instrument tuning and it would calculate chord and scale positions. It was kind of cool.. I wrote it in C++ for Windows using MFC for the GUI and it worked well enough to help me continue my 4.0 GPA and graduate Summa Cum Laud. So, as a way to keep my chops up and to build something that would also work in Linux, I started re-writing the project in Java. That project is on Source Forge as the project Tapper. Originally it was written as a tool for learning The Chapman Stick but it’s now become a more generic stringed instrument tool. The problem is that, like many Source Forge projects, I was really into the project at the beginning, but as work and life took up more of my time I let it die off. Part of that lack of interest comes from the fact that I haven’t been playing The Stick for the past 2 years. I’m going more towards the acoustic music scene again. I’ve been playing a lot of acoustic guitar (fingerstyle and bluegrass), mandolin, and banjo. So my interest in a Stick teaching tool has subsided. However, I now find myself longing for a technical challenge. So I’d like to start working on Tapper again. However, I also started a new project which I call “Lambada Mail”. It’s an email client that has some serious anti-spam filtering integrated into it. Now, I know that there are several free email clients out there that already do this (In fact, I use Mozilla Thunderbird which already does most of what I want my email client to do). But I still like the idea of writing the program just to keep my mind sharp. Plus, there are some usage issues with Thunderbird that I’d like to do differently. So yeah, I’m still a geek. So if I don’t get my geek fix at work I come home and give myself a project to learn something new. In fact, this blog is one of those projects. I’ve never programmed in Perl before and I’ve not done much CSS work so I decided to combine those two projects and get Blosxom installed (my blogging tool which was written in Perl) and to build this blog page using Cascading Style Sheets. It’s been fun. So that’s a partial explanation of my current Geek projects. When we move up north I’ll have some more time to explore these programming projects and that’s when I’d be really open to bringing in other programmers to my Source Forge projects. It will be fun to actually write code again. It’s just odd that in a quest to do more programming I have to leave my programmer’s job. Oh well, life is full of those kinds of surprises.This story is from the
[/geek] department
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