So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

I have retired, and this will likely be my last post. It is ramblings about my 39 years of building software by opening an editor and typing code.

Over the years of designing and creating software, I was fortunate enough to work with some really sharp people on some cool projects. Here are a few memorable quips:

“Sailorman Popeye is a structured programmer. Olive Oyl is an object-oriented programmer” for my presentation about OOP when it was new.
“… but he’s a nice guy” is often overheard after a pair of devs just totally flamed a coworker.
“It’s shit, T!” “It’s not shit, J!” after T wrote some low-level mainframe code that took the entire machine down.
DAMPTAT was the acronym for some doc we created: DB2 Amazin' Mavens' Procedures, Tips and Tricks, but publicly known as DB2 Activities, Methods, Procedures, Tips and Tricks,
“I can write a program that doesn’t work, too,” after shown a crashing demo of a supposedly great app.
“What do we do if they leave a baby locked in the car after the rental is over?”
“If you could do that, we’ll be fat, dumb, and happy,” said by a trio of clients. Which was which?
“You can write crap in any language,” my comment to A after our rewrite of a C app in Java was faster than the original. The client said, “It’s ok if it’s slower, since it’s Java.”
“We never wanted _____” Even though in the previous meeting they said “We must have _____” The client is always right.
“I hate daylight savings time.”
A always had good advice, which I often passed on: “Just give it the eigenoree”, which I had to have spelled out for me: I G N O R E. KYHD: “Keep your head down.” KYMS: “Keep your mouth shut.” and JDWYAT: “Just Do What You Are Told”
“There are naked people in the mall!” You don’t hear that working on a banking app.

I used to say, “Coding is a drug, and I’m addicted.” With the rise of our AI overlords, coding is something AI does for you. Now, you just give it a spec of what you want, and it does it! All you have to do is validate that it did what you asked. For someone who enjoyed coding, that is a major paradigm shift.

For an old timer like me, coding was my craft, and I enjoyed it. One of my hobbies is bookbinding. I enjoy that craft also, but I would not if I had a machine that I told: Create a 7x9 book with 200 pages of 80lb plain paper. Use marbled endpapers. The cover will be tan cloth and be quarter-bound red leather and out the other end came a book.

I’m not saying that AI-created software is bad. It is the future. Rather, it’s sad that something I enjoyed doing to make a living is no longer viable (Did someone mention buggy whips?). In the last few months of my career, I used AI to create or modify several apps, and it was very impressive. In some cases, I tweaked the code by hand to fine-tune it, in others, I asked AI to do it. In one case, I created a complex web app and didn’t touch one line of code. But it wasn’t “fun.”

I hope my gainfully-employed developer friends can stay that way as AI changes ~~our~~ your industry. Best of luck to all of you.

And as the title says: So long, and thanks for all the fish¹.

To close on a lighter note, I was recently interviewed by a globally recognized media outlet. Here’s an excerpt:²

Interviewer: Do you use AI when creating your apps?

Seekatar: I use only the finest bits, dew picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest quality spring water, lightly scanned, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth byte and lovingly frosted with hand-crafted code.

Interviewer: So you don’t use AI?

Seekatar: No.

Interviewer: And you leave the bits in?

Seekatar: If I took the bits out it wouldn’t be crunchy would it? ³

AI was not used in the writing of this blog. (It did do the photo. Obviously.)

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