Programming

Programming was always a hobby of mine. It started when our teacher in elementary brought a little robot, a little car you could program a bit. Back in 1983. I was immediately hooked.

We got a ZX Spectrum at home in 1984, thereabouts, and I learned to program some basic games.

I picked up on programming later on, on a 286 system. dBaseIII+, mainly. I just love databases.

Then Windows95 emerged, and I fell madly in love with MsAccess and VBA. I used it as a RAD blueprinting tool. You didn’t have to do the ground work, you could just visually design a database system in no time. Sometimes I developed it as a commercial system, sometimes I handed the blueprint over to professional coders. That is my thing, I am a business economist (not a pur sang coder). I build systems blueprints to solve problems, and once I have sketched a working solution, I leave the real coding to our coding professionals, they are far better at low level coding.

Then I discovered the Internet and PHP. Same as with MsAccess, I fell madly in love with it. A few hundred million online machines, and a programming language to work with them. I felt like a kid in a toy store.

The past few years I have not been programming much, I spent 5 years sailing and 5 years accounting, and only occasionally fidgetted a bit with PHP, VB, .Net. I do sometimes code my own WordPress plugins. 

Just for fun.

That is something I learned the hard way, if you turn your hobby into your work, at some point you loose the joy of programming. Impossible deadlines, lots of stress, bad managers, well you know how it works.

Nowadays it is just my hobby again.