Am I programmer?

Saturday, May 10th, 2008 by Marcin Juszkiewicz

Many people think that I am programmer… But what is definition of programmer?

Wikipedia says: A programmer is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software.

My last desktop program was Multiview for AmigaOS 2.04+ which ended life in 2000 year (after over 3 years of development). Then I changed platform to Debian GNU/Linux and started to mainly use software instead of writing it. Of course during studies I wrote some code in few languages (C, C++, Z80 Asm, PIC16 Asm/C/BASIC and maybe some other) but none of them was something to be used by normal people.

For few years my work title was “PHP programmer” (with some variants) but writing code for websites is different thing then for desktop computers.

Eric Sink wrote one day great post about programmers and developers. According to this I am rather developer then programmer.

My programmer part of me know how to fix code written in PHP (used this language for few years to get paid), Python (but never got proper amount of knowledge about it) and few others — one day I had to debug small application written in 8086 assembler which I saw for first time — and all I had was source code printout.

But I also many times worked with clients to get informations what they really need to be done in project and those discussions changed many aspects of first draft of specifications. Then transforming specs into design and finally into code which gives working service at the end. Providing help to few ~60 years old ladies which use CMS written by you can be hard job — especially when documentation is not yet created so no one else know each system parts.

But there are many work titles to choose from: Programmer, Developer, Engineer, Software (Engineer / Architect / Developer / Designer) so I probably will stay with Developer and will not try to explain too much what exactly I am doing for living :)



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Happy New Year 2006

Sunday, January 1st, 2006 by Marcin Juszkiewicz

HNY… 10 years ago I had Amiga 600 and got ‘Happy New Year 96′ virus with some software. It was simple virii but from time to time I had system crashes which was not there before. I remember how I disassembled it and wrote my first Amiga util.. It was simple ‘antivirus’ app which read infected file and replaced some viri code by jumps to not get it initialized. It was simple, slow, written in Pascal but it worked ;)

Happy New Year for all!



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20th Birthday of Commodore Amiga

Saturday, July 23rd, 2005 by Marcin Juszkiewicz

It was 20 years ago when Commodore Amiga (the initial name of the Amiga 1000) was unveiled officially at the Lincoln Centre in New York.

I had Amiga 600 (with HDD and 2MB RAM) then switched to A1200 which got many upgrades like faster CPU (68030/50 and then 68040/40), additional IDE controler and more RAM (64MB FastRAM was very big amount of RAM :)

Now I don’t have Amiga machine but does not feel that I need one — that time passed away few years ago.



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