Laying My Cards on the Table

I'm not entirely sure about the kind of things I'm inclined to write about, so I thought I'd take a moment to at least lay my biographical cards on the table, so to speak.

I'm a thirty eight year old computer programmer, living in London with my wife and one year old daughter. I work for an engineering company writing CAD software in C++ which I suspect will come up in one or two future postings (if I post at all, that is).

Years ago I started my programming life by writing Cobol programs. In some ways, I look back on programming in Cobol with a good deal of nostalga. I found it to be a pretty well structured and readable language. In fact, I find the C++ code I write is starting to remind me of old Cobol code. Hmmmm. Via a couple of meanderings into 8086 assembler (yuck!) and DEC-10 Macro assember (yummy!), I wound up programming in C for years and years on Unix systems and eventually C++ on various incarnations of Windows NT, starting with version 3.51.

In 2001 I discovered GNU/Linux and, for home use, I've been pretty much hooked ever since. Every now and then I try to convince my bosses that we should free (in the GNU sense) some of our software. No joy yet, but you never know....