How did I get here? Never did I imagine that my career would land in software development. I always thought I’d be an author (indeed, so did my teachers and mentors). I briefly considered changing my major to pre-med. Even as I finished my computer science degree, I was only a few classes short of a business double-major.
And yet, here I am, twenty years removed from my first blunderings with C++ in 2005, not even understanding what “programming” actually meant – here I am, a principal dev.
I’ve saved quite a lot of my personal projects1 over the years. Not nearly all of them, by any means, but enough to point and laugh at. This is the start of something like a series of blog posts showing off the stupid and useless experiments that land a person in a career somewhat like mine.
In no way do I intend these to be instructive – at best, amusing. The landscape has changed in twenty years. I don’t know if I’d recommend software development as a career at all anymore, thanks to AI. But imparting lessons learned is a time-honored tradition for the Elder Devs, and this is maybe a small contribution I can make.
- Earliest Experiments (C++/HTML)
- Game Making (C/Java)
- “Operating Systems” (PASCAL)
- Robotics Forays (Assembly)
- First Useful Apps (Python)
- Ontology Engine (C++/C#)
- College (C++/Python)
- Early Career (Python/Java/Scala)
- Recent Personal Projects (Java/C#)
- I might lightly describe some of the professional projects I’ve worked on in the well-distant past. But since I can’t legally share any IP, it’d likely be next to useless. ↩︎
Tim Sullivan 