So I came to a strange realization last night. I've been working for REAL Software for half of a decade now. It's kind of hard to believe that it's been five years already! I certainly don't feel five years older, but when I look at what I've accomplished, it's hard to imagine it's only been five years.
Personal:
1) I met Elissa, dated her and got engaged to her. Whoa.
2) I built my own house from the ground up.
3) I found Pixel and became a cat person. Now I have two cats (Miikka counts as mine too).
4) I've been through three vehicles (started with the Escort, then moved to the Dakota and am now at the F150).
5) I moved to Austin, then moved twice more around the city, then moved back up to MN and moved once more since getting up here. That's a lot of times to pack my crap up! It must explain why my vehicles keep getting larger.
Professional:
1) We ported the IDE from Mac to Windows
2) Then we decided to rewrite the entire thing from scratch
3) I learned as much as I could about networking and wrote all of the low-level networking code
4) Moved on to learning everything I could about serial devices (a big thanks goes out to Bob Rau for helping me learn!) and wrote all of the serial code
5) Continued my learning streak and extended it to user interface design and accessibility: two topics which are so huge that I'm not certain I'll ever stop learning about them. But I've made big strides in the usability of the IDE because of it.
6) And since I'm a learning freak, I picked up several skills along the way: compiler, debugger, plugins, threads, folderitems & streams, and many other areas of the product have felt my icy grip.
7) I've matured in my coding style and skills. I've gotten better at seeing refactoring patterns and when it's appropriate to use them. I've also gotten better at designing more robust code from the start. But these are things which programmers never stop refining.
8) Scarily enough, I've well surpassed the decade mark for Win32 programming. I realized the other day that I'm approaching fifteen years of Win32 API knowledge. And I still have so much more to learn!
It's been a crazy past five years, but a very good kind of crazy. Now I'm looking forward to the next five!
I almost forgot these:
9) Started up a successful side business with Bill which satiates my passion for writing: RBLibrary.com.
10) Spoken at several professional developer conferences and not had anything throw anything at me. Yet.
We can fix #10 this year if you really want :)
Kudos to you.. That's a pretty acceptable list of accomplishments.
I started with RB at 5.x, and the improvements in usability since then are fantastic. Many quite small things are easier to do and together they add up to a much better experience. The 2005+ tabbed IDE is a massive step forward. Thank you.