This is a personal blog written under the pseudonym bewilder by me — a person who has worked in the software industry for the past 30 years and seen many a fad, listened through all the hype and had more than my fair share of corporate bullshit to contend with.
I started coding as a kid on a BBC Micro Model B dabbling in BASIC, before moving on to an Atari ST and writing some absolutely heinous 68000 assembly things.
After studying pure maths and computer science at university, I started my career with C/C++ as a really bad embedded systems programmer, before moving into commercial and business software with crap like Delphi, Visual Basic, MSVC++, lots of SQL (various dialects).
I got out of the embedded programming game because the kit I was working on was being used to suppress and/or kill people. This was an ethical decision I made as a young father around the age of 22, and one that I’m still pretty proud of even today.
In those (pre-hyperscaler) days I was a Microsoft fanboy through and through — I pretty much knew
Brockschmidt from cover to cover and
would bore people for hours rambling on about IUnknown interfaces and the terrible, terrible inner
workings of COM. Coding components from scratch using ATL was no fun then, and I’m pretty sure it’s
no fun now. The shame.
Posts here are sporadic by design. Replies and comments are warmly received via bewilder.