The begining...

 Many moons ago, I wrote program code for a living, I was a coder and to say I enjoyed it would be an understatement, I was obsessed by it and as a consequence by tech in general, I was a great big computer geek.  I started leaning Basic on a Commodore 16 when I was about 8 or 9 years old.

Where it all started.

Then there was the Amstrad CPC464 and then the tech loves of my life an Amiga 500+ and a copy of Amos Basic followed closely by an Amiga 1200 and a copy of Storm C.  I learnt C++ an University I wrote C and C++ code for my first job, a small company on a local industrial estate and the code ran on custom touchscreen operated Linux consoles.  This was back when Memory and CPU resources were tight, touchscreen only consoles were not common, PS/2 was just becoming the connector of choice for keyboards and mice and sometimes to get your screen to display data at the speed you were scrolling through it you had to embed some assembly code.  

Look at how far the back that goes!

After that I sold out out a little bit and moved to a large U.S. Consultancy and learnt Forte 4GL, followed by Java, VB6, Perl, a bit more C++, more Java ( J2EE) , XML, XSLT etc, all of the hot tech of the time.  The pay was better, the culture was worse, soulless and along with the languages I learnt that big organisation don't care, neither about their staff nor quality of the code that was being generated.   Still, it paid the bills and I expanded my skills, I grew in confidence and eventually decided that, after a few very fraught career discussions, it was time to quit and I went contracting.  

I had good times, I worked hard, sometimes I even enjoyed the work but gradually I was worn down, the frequent job moves, the interviews, the big companies, the seemingly endless grind of trying to keep up with the new stuff I lost my enjoyment of coding and gradually moved on to other things, infrastructure, application deployment, systems architecture.  It paid the bills and did just enough to keep me interested enough to turn up but it never recaptured the enjoyment I had in that first job where every cpu cycle counted and it wasn't enough that the code did what you wanted, it had to do it efficiently.

That's the ramble that brings me to now.  I've still written the occasional line over the last 10 years, be it installation scripts written in Bash or WebSphere configuration done in Python (well... Jython) but mostly I produce word documents and Visio diagrams, I do high level systems design but I don't write code and I miss it a bit.  I've tried to get back in to writing applications a few times with home projects but life tends to get in the way, it's difficult to find the time and without practise, none of it really sticks and I think, if I really want to make it stick, I need to make coding my job.   

That all being said, why am I writing it all down?  A couple of reasons.

• Firstly motivation.  If I feel like I need to make semi regular entries here then it will help, I hope, to encourage me to stick at it.  I'll need something to write about and so I will need to keep pushing forward.  
• Secondly, I hope it will be a help me keep some focus.   If I write down what I've been doing, if I keep a record of some of my thoughts then it will keep my focus.  I won't drop Python mid typing because the Angular butterfly has just fluttered past.  If I do, I'm going to have to write about why and justify it.
• Thirdly and finally, I hope this won't be too long a journey, but if it is I'd quite like a record of it so that I can remember how I got to the end or, if I didn't, maybe I'll be able to see why.

While writing blog entries is one tactic I'm using to keep me focused I'm also going to maintain a reading list, it should appear on the left.  Over the time of this project I'm intending to not just dust off the skills, I'm going to feed my brain technology books the way I used to and hopefully the reading list will be a useful trove of good books that will help round off my tech job skills while I dust off and polish up my old coding neurons.  I don't think being a good developer is all about knowing every nuance of a language and being able to deploy it as required.  There are a whole lot of, we'll call them inappropriately, soft skills that I think a good developer needs to know, from the whole totally corporate sounding 'stakeholder management' through to (very) basic cryptography that a good developer should know.  If you don't know why you shouldn't just store that password in plaintext it's just as bad as not understanding why or how you need to be able to manage expectations.  My reading list therefore is going to cover a whole range of topics that I think are pertinent to being, at the very least, an adequate and content developer.

As a starter, today I'm adding :

Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, I've owned several copies over the years (ands managed to leave them on desks) but never read it all.  It was always a good primer and while it may be out of date in terms of the individual algorithms used, I think it's a good starter.

The Pragmatic Programmer  by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, I've dug out my old copy and much like the figurative cobwebs I intend to brush off, I've dusted it off for a read.  I probably should pick up a copy of the 20th anniversary edition.

The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll.  The true story of how an astronomer come Systems Manager at Berkley went from discovering a hacker to tracking down "an international spy ring fuelled by Cash cocaine and the KGB", ok, not a learn to program book but it was these sorts of stories that captured my attention back in the day so, it counts.

So that's it, entry number one.  What next?  I think I need to give some thought about where to start.  A bit of Python?  Do I dust off the Java books in the hope that it all comes flooding back?  Do I need to pick an editor or an IDE?  Should I perhaps start by tidying my desk?

There's been a lock down, I've spent a lot of time here...