Seems to me Dick that we are very much on the same page. You are right that I have a focus on programs rather than systems. My career has mainly focused on application development, not on systems.
I am not a server side developer. I have spent most of my time building advance 3D modeling sofware for professonionals in the oil industry. That is a very different world from containers, microservices, messaging services, cloud etc.
It is also a world where I feel programming language choices have had profound impact on productivity and ability to solve problems.
I did read through a lot of what you wrote, but again it is not that I disagree with it. It is simply that I choose to focus on other aspects of software decelopment. I am focusing on the trunk if you will. Others can do the tail or the feet of the elephant.
And finally somebody else can look at the elephant from a birdseye perspective.
I had to make a choice long time ago whether I wanted to get into architecture at the scale you talk about, and it simply was not something I felt I was cut out for, nor something that interests me. Even desktop development felt too big to me at times so I ventured into mobile app development.
Ironically I found that mobile App development has been so poisoned by people who have spent long time coding in these big server style world, that they overcomplicate problems. People used to building large systems, ironically don't seem to understand how you build small systems.
They begin drawing up big systems with databases, and frameworks galore when a simple plain text file will do. I cannot really advice people on how to build large systems. But I do have some ideas on how to build applicatons for single users.
When I write about Java, docker, containers etc, I am really just a tourist in a foreign land reporting back home on the odd things that I see.
Funny you are just one year younger than my mother. Crazy in a way to meet someone of her generation so deep into computer systems. I remember growing up how much my mom hated the computereization of her workplace. But she has come to enjoy it more now I think.
How did you end up working so many places? Did your company send you to different offices on assignments or did you choose to apply to jobs in other countries?
