Re: What do you do in real life?

["Shawn B." <leabre@html.com>]

> Anyone who is lurking in this forum has been immersed in technology for at 
> least the last twenty years.  Many have gone on to jobs in technology.
>
> [Snip]
>
> Eight bit computing is a nice escape from modern computing.  So I ask 
> readers of c.s.apple2 -- what do you do in the real  life?  What do you do 
> for a living?

I started programming on an Apple IIe back in 1987.  I've been programming 
and bit twiddling ever since.  These days, I'm a Sr. Software Architect for 
one of the fortune 500's.  I do a lot of technical programming (high 
availability, grid and cluster implementations, and the backend software) to 
keep hundreds of millilons (during peak time) transactions per day running 
smoothly.  I find it just as fun as back in the Apple days.  Most people 
don't like writing line of business applications or application servers but 
it is quite fun.  There is always opportunity for improvements given certain 
constraints.  There's nothing more interesting than writing multiprocessor 
code that works fine on quad processors but then running the same on 32-64 
way servers and realizing you have bottlenecks (that manifest after 16 
CPU's) in the synchronization code itself is "fun" to debug.  I don't think 
I can ever leave the technical side of software development for cushy 
management type position.  Architecture is just the right in-between for my 
taste.

Sometimes I still return to the Apple with knowledge I have today and try to 
do things that weren't imagined back in the 80's.  Things like message queue 
servers, text-gui's, etc.  It is interesting and fun to see what a little 
65c02 with 64/128k can do.

Thanks,
Shawn