June 21st this year was its longest day, also Fathers’ Day and my birthday. I feel vaguely guilty because I haven’t the slightest insight into this growing-old thing, so don’t expect golden-years reportage.
As above so below.
1955 · You could look it up; a good birth-year geek career choice. For example Allman, Bechtolsheim, Berners-Lee, Booch, Dubinsky, Gates, Gelernter, Gosling, Jobs, Murai, Ozzie, Schmidt, and Winer. (Feeling a little humbled right about now.)
Summer in the city.
2015 · I’ll let you in on a little secret: Making computer software full-time is a lot harder than doing it a little and writing about it a lot. For the first time in some decades, I spend all the time that I’m not in meetings about software in front of a computer constructing it. It’s high-risk stuff and may never ship. Fortunately I still like programming and the environment is pretty much free of toxic people.
That thing about time passing faster as you age is total crap. At least with respect to planning meetings.
But, what with that and a family featuring a difficult daughter, I’m tired a lot. One symptom is less blogging. Well, that’s also a function of not writing about the day job.
That’s what I call aging gracefully.
I’ll tell you something though; blogging may not be the fashion nexus it was a decade back, but it’s where everything that’s important about this profession is said. Start, for instance, at /r/programming and try to find something that’s not a blog. (Yeah, I know, Reddit ewwww, but for geek stuff it’s the place.) Blogs burst outta the geekosphere round the turn of the millennium, and maybe that’s the heartland we fall back on. Which isn’t terrible. And while us nerds may exhibit poor social skills, we write better than average. My tribe.
Tired, you said? · So why not retire? Because I totally don’t have trouble getting up in the morning and cracking open a screen to see what’s new. And I wake up realizing why Plan D for payload subset extraction is just as flawed as A, B, and C were; but E gleams on the horizon. There’s work to be done!
Boat bedtime.
Busy, you said? · Oh, I didn’t mention Ingress and the camera and the boat and the island and my geeky wife and my son who’s turning 16 and will be taller than me by 17 and my Mom, all there at 85. Plus I’m reading a lot.
The years that flow by? I notice the seasons intensely, but not really the numbers attached.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: BWJones (Jun 24 2015, at 23:14)
Lovely thoughts and images. As always.
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From: Ed Murphy (Jun 25 2015, at 03:05)
beautiful
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From: Eric A. Meyer (Jun 25 2015, at 10:16)
You can add Zeldman to that list of last names. Quite a year indeed! I feel like i was born too late.
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From: Jon Udell (Jun 25 2015, at 22:05)
Thanks Tim!
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From: Paul Morriss (Jun 29 2015, at 07:23)
I have a son who is turning 16 too. I've probably been reading your blog since before his birth. You're 11 years ahead of me, but I probably won't reach state retirement age for another 20. It will be interesting to see how I feel about software development then.
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From: Roland (Jun 30 2015, at 06:19)
happy birthday week tim! i'm in my 5th decade and what you said resonates wonderfully! although of course i don't write software for a living, for me it's an obsession that's best kept as a hobby :-)
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