On the 6th of November I joined other local developers at the Microsoft Offices in Brisbane and around the world to listen to Steve Balmer talk to developers1. He was excited and so was I. Steve confirmed one of my truths which is that "the really cool stuff that goes on the IT industry is done by developers". Wow! I love developing software. I'm passionate about it. I'm fascinated by computers, how they work and I really enjoy solving problems with software.
Steve's talk reminded me of when Bob Atkinson (the Queensland Police Commissioner) said that the Charge Prep Project (that I was working on) was the most significant project we would ever work on in our professional careers. This was because it was going to reshape the charging process: how charges were delivered to the Department of Justice (electronically), improve the quality of the charges being produced, speed up the charging process and deliver much needed reporting capabilities. I was touched. The thought that your work would be used by thousands every day, all over Queensland, for years touched me. I really do like working on those ground breaking systems that take people and organisations into a whole new space.
When I was deciding on a career I followed the old axiom to "choose a job that allows you to do the thing you love." I had three choices Priesthood, Secondary Teaching and Programming. I chose Programming and haven't looked back. Here is a quote from The Pragmatic Programmer that sums up my programming experience:
Programming is a craft. At its simplest, it comes down to getting a computer to do what you want it to do (or what your user wants it to do). As a programmer you are part listener, part advisor, part interpreter, and part dictator. You try to capture elusive requirements and find a way of expressing them so that a mere machine can do them justice. You try to document your work so that others can understand it, and you try to engineer your work so that others can build on it. What's more, you try to do all this against the relentless ticking of the project clock. You work small miracles every day.2
What Steve Balmer said resonated with me and I am truly excited about Cloud Computing. I can see so many applications for it. At Wardy IT we are in the process of packaging some products we've been working on to sell online. One of them called Hermes (light weight messaging and middleware framework) could be deployed to the Cloud giving customers virtually unlimited scalability. The way I think about Cloud Computing is similar to the way I experienced the Internet. It's a new technology, a platform, a paradigm that promises great power and new possibilities. I say "bring it on!"
1 Liberation Day
2 The Pragmatic Programmer Preface xvii.