Well, the decision has been made.
After some rather convoluted discussion with family and friends, it's time to leave the programming for profit thing behind.
I started out pounding code in the late 1970s on an Exidy Sorcerer in Basic and z-80 asm. In the early 1980s I had the sheer joy of being involved in the launch of the Victor 9000 and wrote a lot of code for that machine using MBasic and BASCOM as well as becoming the Canadian Service Manager for the product line. Then along came the early IBM PCs. Victor went under, I moved to private practice (which actually worked back then) and wrote a ton of Pascal code for the new wonderbox right up to 2003 when I switched to Pelles C which I still use as my primary programming tool.
Back in the days of MS-DOS and early versions of Windows, programming was a challenging intellectual hobby, more fun than work and certainly a lot more successful than it is now. There were almost daily innovations as people developed new ideas and pounded out creatively written code that made the rounds of programmers on floppy disks and bar codes in magazines. Someplace in a dusty box I still have the issue of PC magazine in which the front page story was about recursion, a major breakthrough at the time.
I wrote Point of Sale and Inventory management packages that still exist today, still in use after re-writes, a translation from Pascal to C and numerious updates and new features. These packages went into small to medium sized parts distributors, primarily used to inventory and catalog electronic parts, fasteners and even antique car parts. My customers were loyal and the work was challenging... what more could I ask?
However; things have changed these last few years. Either by the unstoppable creep of age or deliberate complication by industry giants (Microsoft in particular) programming has stopped being the interesting challenge it used to be and has now become little more than a tedius chore, mired in needless complexities such as the UAC, Manifests, active x, software stores ... Well you get the idea. There are a hundred acronyms all attacking the freedom and success of the one time profitable game of programming. Freeware and Shareware are slowly giving way to pressure from above as operating systems become unbearably complex, programming languages move to less and less innovative design and the work itself becomes an exercise in tedium, spending more and more time and effort on peripheral matters such as code signing, account priveledges and such.
And now there's all this crap about Metro interfaces....
So I've decided to cut and run while I'm still ahead of the game. Programming is now the undertaking of teams, not individuals, corporations not consultants, it's big not small. The adventure is dying as is the joy of success.
As a long term keyboard addict (as my smarter half calls me) I will still be around, I will probably still write some code... but as of this morning that will only be hobby stuff, for my own use... and maybe the occasional addon ...
Finally, I just want to say thanks to you all for the help and support you've given me over the years. It has been deeply appreciated.
