On my way to WWDC
As I write this post on my way to WWDC, flying somewhere over Mexico, I cannot help think why I am doing this. After all, I have a nice job at IBM which I enjoy and (as a bonus) pays the bills. This doesn’t leave me much time for programming, specially since my family consumes most of the time I have left, which is normal since I really enjoy the quality time we spend together. So why do I always try to find some spare time to run XCode and add some new functionality to my side projects?
Just before boarding the plane I was reading an article in Spanish newspaper El Pais. It turns out that the PC is turning 25 this year. That is a lot, specially considering most marriages do not reach this mark nowadays. In my case, romance with software development is even older than that. It all started in 1980 when I was 13. I had been working hard to buy myself a motorcycle. I had saved enough money to buy it and even had some extra cash. I was going to use it to buy Sony Walkman (the early 80’s iPod). However, when I got to the store something strange happened. I saw a TI-58 programmable calculator at half-price because they had lost the original box. I had always been intrigued by those calculators as I knew they could be used to run simple games. It was a unique opportunity and Sony lost a sure sale. The TI was fun but I quickly outgrew it and move to the HP-41, which was a true dream calculator, even by todays standards. Meanwhile I started programming at school using a mini computer (a PR1ME system which had two 5MB hard disk drives called Castor and Polux). I also joined a TRS-80 user group which introduced me to BASIC. During a summer camp in Germany I also had the opportunity to play with a PET Commodore. So when I sold my motorcycle a year later because I was leaving Geneva to move to Madrid I had a pretty good idea of what computer to buy. It had to support for color, joysticks, floppy drives and be easily programmable in assembly language. The only option at the time was an Apple II.
You cannot imagine how much time I spent on that computer. There wasn’t as much software as there is today and everything needed to be done. I wrote, games, educational software and all kinds of stuff. I simply loved it. The OS was simple but bugs free and never got in my way. I was able to publish my first commercial application for that platform in the US at age 19 and continued for a couple of years while studying at college. During this period I could spend days in front of the computer, producing thousands of lines of assembly language code.
Now back in 2006 it has been 21 years since my first Apple Expo in San Francisco which I attended to find a publisher for a product called “Teacher’s Wizard”. I have just turned 40 and I thought that it was a good moment to look back and also look into the future. I was recently named manager at IBM and technical skills become less important. Most managers use that as an excuse to stop learning. Did I want that? Were my programming days behind me? Hell no. Managing a technical team is nice because you can help a lot of engineers which are normally misunderstood. But that doesn’t mean that I want to resign my technical skills. I still enjoy programming and have lots of projects that I want to bring to reality. The flame is still burning.
So, when I was thinking about what I wanted for my 40th birthday the answer was unambiguous, a new 17” MacBook Pro and a ticket to WWDC to share the passion with fellow programmers. I may not be able to fly to San Francisco next year, because these trips are quite expensive, but I will certainly be watching the keynote through the web while working on my next Cocoa application.