How to Commit Suicide by Software Engineering, and how not to

Prologue: How I fell in love

It was 1977, and I was 11 years old at the time. The planet was still in a head-spin over a rash of new electronic inventions such as calculators (TI started manufacturing them in 1966) and the world’s first video game, Pong, released in 1972. Up until then, computers had been the stuff of scientists and government. Before then, hard drives were the size of washing machines, and programming was something done by feeding punch cards into a slot. At the time, software engineering wasn’t a job that most people even knew existed, let along as something to build a career out of. The internet wouldn’t arrive on a public basis until almost 13 years later when Tim Berners-Lee released it in 1990.

How strange it is to have a built my own career from a technology that didn’t exist while my father was still alive

My older brother, who had always been a bit of a visionary, was an early adopter of the latest cool technology being sold at Radio Shack, the TRS-80 Model I. For a mere $600 ($3,500 in 2018 dollars) you got an absolutely whopping 4Kb (yes, Kilobytes) of memory, a 64x16 uppercase-only black and white monitor (green screens were released later after screen “burn in” was recognized as a problem) and no built-in storage device whatsoever. In fact…