Tablets and other such devices

Ok, so I’m a traditional programmer, with 30 years of application development experience, in a whole new world of tablets, smart phones, html5, flash, silverlight, ajax, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. In other words, I’m an old techie, in a whole new world. In a way, a world where youth rules. And that can be a good thing. Youth brings new ideas, energy, innovation, and creativity. I frequently learn lessons from my younger colleagues and break out of my cube to try something new. However, you kids can learn from us old folks too! I was around, and programming, when everyone had a monitor that was tbe same color – the same screen color I mean. Later, we all thought it was cool to use a monitor (actually a terminal) with orange letters on the screen instead of green! Then some people at work started getting smart terminals, and they had colored text, and only special people got these. Then a few lucky people got a pc! This was even cooler because they got their own apps called WordStar and VisiCalc.

Pretty soon the apps became better and people wanted to use WordPerfect instead of WordStar or the old-fashioned mainframe word processors we had been using.

Today we’re in the same kind of evolutionary time as I experienced in the early part of my career. However things are faster now, and more portable. Communications have left the corporate world and are available to most everyone on the planet from the palm of their hand.

Kids these days don’t realize that when I worked at large corporations in the ’70s and early 80s, people could communicate with each other through the mainframe. We could send messages to people in Austrailia or New Brunswick or France just as easily as we can today. The internet, however, makes that type of communication second nature, and anyone can communicate with anyone else anytime they please.

So its an exciting time to be a developer. But you young developers need to remember we “old folks” solved the same problems your solving today, only different.