Taking a rather extended lunch break today, I went to the Blue Hole waterfall near Elizabethton in east Tennessee. What a sight!
I know my policy is to avoid blogging about things not related to the IT/Software Development industry, but this sight is certainly worth breaking the policy. If you like waterfalls, or just ‘getting away" this is a great place to go. If you’d like to see more, I’ve uploaded a few pictures to my Flickr page.
Speaking of Flickr, in a previous life I worked as a photographer and as such I’ve built up quite a collection, over the next few weeks I’ll be scanning parts of my collection and uploading them. They cover a wide range of topics, so odds are you’ll find something you like. Just as a note, I’ve added a link to my Flickr page in the “Sites” list as “My Photos” on the left panel.
It has been 20 years since I first used machine learning to solve a complex business problem. The underlying problem was simple: the company was selling a new service and wanted to know who was most likely to buy it. We had millions of records, and each record had hundreds of fields. A vast amount of data, but no idea how to extract insight from it. Countless hours from various data analysts had been invested into finding a pattern, but none was forthcoming.
(Disclaimer: This is something of a rant, and was written at 3AM. My apologies if it doesn’t make sense. Feel free to ignore.)
It’s 3AM, and I’m up reading, again. Is it the latest great novel or one of the classics that I enjoy so much? No, it’s research for my latest hobby. It’s lasers this time, but this pattern is far from new.
I’m starting to think I just try to do too much, I go in too many different directions.
Recently a programmer I know decided that it was time for a career change, leaving the IT field entirely. This gave me cause to think; what does it take to be a great developer. Many people go through school believing they have what it takes, only to receive a rude awaking once they enter the real world.
Before I go on, I think it’s important to define what I mean by developer, and the differences between a developer and a programmer.
To celebrate 15 years of Visual Basic, a quick glance to the past:
Microsoft Announces Visual Basic at Windows World ‘91 General-Purpose, High-Productivity Programming System for Microsoft Windows
ATLANTA — May 20, 1991 — Microsoft today announced MicrosoftR Visual BasicTM programming system at the Windows World ‘91 industry trade show. Visual Basic is a graphical application development system for Microsoft WindowsTM graphical environment version 3.0 that combines visual design tools with a powerful, general-purpose programming language and Windows .
I’m a developer, and I love what I do, it’s a great industry, and a very exciting field to be in. If you read my blog often, you’ll see I take every opportunity to mention how great this line of work can be, today I offer a somewhat different, less sugar-coated view.
The Pressure There is a constant pressure on developers to be better, to do more, to produce more, sometimes more than is possible.
