Since probably around 7th grade, when I was 12 years old, I've been
writing software in some way, shape, or form. Before that I *had*
written some batch scripts, vbscripts, and maybe one VB.Net program, but
those didn't really amount to much. The real goo and butter started when
I was 12 with Telecom Inc.
For whatever reason, I decided to found "Telecom Inc. Software," and
over the years I've written a bunch of different programs under that
name (starting with the Telecom Web Browser - about the only real use of
'telecom' there ever was). Most of them were in VB.Net, since, y'know,
that's the only real programming language I knew other than probably
BASIC and QBASIC. I really love it. Writing programs just feels so
great, for whatever reason, and having an end result that I *actually*
use is even better. My abilities are constantly getting better and
better, and I really just enjoy what I do. I'm even getting paid for it
this summer, working on that Eudora Welty initiative. It's great. Maybe
if I had jumped on the app train back in 2013 I'd be a millionaire. lol.
Telecom's basically been abandoned at this point, sadly. I make probably
one update to it a year, and now that the CO.NR domain is dead, I'm
probably just going to allow it to die off and move the only programs I
bother to use anymore to a different domain (which is why I have three
of my Telecom programs available on my sdf site - jebug29.sdf.org). I
hate to, but y'know, I'm kind of tired of using a brand that doesn't
even make sense for any reason other than nostalgia. It's not like I had
any real users, and my beta testing team rarely even touches my software
anymore (lol, yes, I had a secret beta testing team). Oh well.
But I did realize something recently: I've been writing programs on SDF
without even thinking about it. I wrote g - my gopher shortcut utility -
just recently. I also recently updated ChkMail (a program that checks to
see if the user has any unread or new emails in their inbox). And I'm
even still using a program I wrote to just check and see if anyone has
commented on this Gopher hole on my comment page (which was written in
PHP). And, sure, three out of four of those are just BASH scripts (not a
real man's programming language like x86 assembler yar har), but they're
still *programs*. That's the beauty of Unix: you can use pre-existing
programs altogether to create an entirely new program. Use a combination
of wc and mail and you can get how many e-mails are in your inbox.
Redirect a user to a gopher hole using just a short input. It's
something that's useful and nice to have, and they're all things I
actually use and built for a purpose other than to build them. It just
makes me happy to do so.
Also, supposedly as a MetaARPA member I can author system software, so
is it acceptable for me to make something like g available to everyone
or? I don't know much about this, and I haven't yet seen a tutorial on
it (so I wouldn't even know which folder I would be allowed to drop it
in). Input from some other members would be nice (via e-mail at
[email protected] or Mastodon @
[email protected] or even the
comments page on my Gopher).
Anyway, I've basically lost my train of thought now looool. Thanks for
reading! Have a great day!
Also, if you have access to a fancy smanshy graphical web browser:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PvNs-QW1BY
