MJ Walters

Do I want to be a code poet? No!

I'm a software developer (sometimes I say engineer, but really? An engineer?!). I'm also a creative writer with my pause button pressed. I should be playing, but I'm not.

I came across a phrase today that made me shout 'Yes!', before I brought my hands down in a confused hairy muddle. Another software developer engineer person described themselves on their website as a code poet. A code poet! I love that. It captures something about the joy of coding, but it's also wrong, deep down in my soul wrong.

Of course I'm over-reacting, that's what I do when my mental patterns are on automatic.

A poet has something to express, expresses it in words and imagery, then keeps expressing it through the editing process until the poem is finished, both emotionally and structurally.

A coder takes a specification or set of requirements and produces a piece of software that is easy-to-use, intuitive, fast, and easy to maintain/change/add to.

The parallel that works for me is the reworking to achieve some sort of beauty of form, of elegance, of great design. Poets and coders both do that. But is calling myself a code poet an attempt to pretend writing code is like writing poetry? Saving me from taking the risk of writing real poetry? Of expressing my feelings and having the world read them?

Code is all about logic, and code poetry is elegance and simplicity of logic. It's working on a function, not a feeling. At this stage in my life, I want to work on my feelings. To avoid this work is wrong wrong wrong for me.

Maybe I'm not over-reacting. It is deep down in my soul wrong. Perhaps I'm confusing my 'mental patterns on automatic' with intuition.

Facebook - deleted!

I'm glad I tried it, but the whole thing left me feeling very uncomfortable about this Web 2.0 thing that's going on. I guess I really mean the sharing of personal stuff thing.

I'm all for connection, but there are people I decided not to keep in touch with for a reason. People I knew in school... there they all are! And they all know each other, or at least they've all signed up to each others Facebook profiles, so you can't be friends with one without suddenly being visible to all these others.

So Facebook is not for me: I'm not comfortable being that visible; I don't want to get in touch with so many people from my past; I'm not convinced my data is safe on those private servers (at least Typepad actually deletes your account!); and I don't want an online identity spread out over the Web (Facebook, Twitter, Typepad, 43 Things, etc).

I'm going to stick to this blog for my public-facing persona. Everything else is going to be anonymous :-)

Software and me - a history

1979, Moon Cresta, Donkey Kong Jr, fruit machines, little black handheld space invaders with red dots, ZX Spectrum, Manic Miner, Jetpac, typing listings from magazines, The Hobbit, Snowball, Lurking Horror, failing to write my own games, Commodore 64, swapping tapes, Atari ST, swapping disks.

1989, University, Fortran, copying someone else and getting caught, an old PC, word processing, writing bad stories, solitaire.

1998, Pascal, Delphi, software engineering, databases, artificial intelligence, websites, email, first PC of my own, HTML, Quake, Flash, ColdFusion, Javascript, big teams, user interfaces, intimidating Java guys.

2003, Powerbook, PHP, MySQL, Apache, SQL, ColdFusion again, project management, web development, business processes, process re-engineering, marketing, content management systems, maintainability.

Now, ColdFusion, Oracle, PL/SQL, requirements, database redesign and data imports.

Where did the fun go?

Facebook - yikes!

I ummed. I ahhed. Then I did it. I joined Facebook.

I have strong mixed feelings about doing this. Working in IT, I'm as aware as anyone of the myriad of databases that hold our personal data - shopping preferences, bank statements, browser histories, credit histories, mobile phone logs, email logs - and as many times as people tell us our data will only be used for [whatever] purpose, it's still there. And forever if companies don't do as they should and stick to data protection policies.

And I'm uncomfortable with the way it walls off a large part of the Internet to a privately-funded enclave through which, at some point, investors are going to want to make some serious money. All  of that personal data will be there to lure us with marketing bait.

On the other hand, everyone is doing it, and I would love to try it :-) I feel like a starved child, my face against the expensive restaurant window glass, watching fat couples in evening dress eating chicken and dribbling juice down their chins.

But enough of my fantasies.

Facebook - I am yours! Let's see if you are worth the sacrifice...

First post

I'm going to use the first few posts to find my feet. No-one knows about this yet :-)

So here is my first post - I'm breaking the ice! Here I am, freezing cold on a beautiful, windy New York November day. Some of the joggers were in shorts, so either I'm a wuss, or NY breeds a particularly tough breed of runner.