for every geek

for everyone who was asked to fix his uncle's machine through the phone
and for the heroes in Egyptian ISP call centers

not so much a Recovering Programmer

B4 u read



by the way i really did go to use a computer for the first time when i was 11 in sakhr my grandfather used to take me there daily

i wrote my first Basic Program on an Atari 2600 system that my parents originally bought for entertainment purposes

i used to write software that does 2D animation based on pixels and areas frame by frame in QBasic

i think i better get up and find that support group

...

source


Recovering Programmer
Hi, my name is Kris. And I am a programmer. "Hi Kris!"

My problem started when I was young. My father took me to an IBM open house and showed me a game called LEM. The computer told me my lunar lander's altitude and my vertical speed, and asked me how much thrust to apply for the next ten seconds. I told it, and then it told me my new position or told me I had crashed.

It was primitive. And it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. I had to understand how it worked, wield the power that made it happen, and use that power to make the world a better place.

My parents bought me an Atari 800 computer for Christmas. I don't blame them for my problem--they didn't know I was susceptible. They didn't know that I often stayed up all night writing programs. They didn't know that I spent my days in school drawing bitmaps on graph paper and mentally converting them to numbers. And they didn't know that the high of using BASIC had worn off, and that I was hitting the harder stuff: 6502 assembly language and figForth.

My problem followed me into college. There, they told me that my code could be beautiful in addition to being functional. And I had a Macintosh, so the programs could look beautiful on the outside in addition to being beautiful on the inside. I wrote socially acceptable programs in Pascal and Lisp. But late at night I would hide alone in my room and hit the hard stuff: M68000 assembly language, and C.

Then, after college, someone actually offered to pay me to fall deeper into my addiction. They encouraged me to use C. But that wasn't enough: I spiked the mix with some C++, Perl, Bourne shell scripts, and even AWK. I did object-oriented programming. I started mixing languages. I wrote programs that wrote programs.

Then my tolerance for programming languages was built up so much that I had to go beyond them. I did every operating system I could get my hands on: OS/2, Unix, OpenVMS, VxWorks, Windows, Linux. I wrote ActiveX control containers in MFC (back before MFC had support for that sort of thing). I wrote RPC, DCOM, and CORBA programs, because I was no longer able to generate enough complexity on a single computer.

When the high from those activities wore off, I bought QuartusForth for my PDA, so that I could write and debug code while sitting in airports, or in traffic, or while waiting for a compile to finish on my desktop machine.

I was looking for the next high. Would it be Java? Or SOAP? Or web services? Or Python, Ruby, C#, ...

My employers didn't help me. Rather than putting me into a recovery program and making sure I got some help, they just enabled my problem by praising me and giving me promotions, raises, bonuses, and stock options.

They asked me to manage a software development team. So of course, I assigned all the important work to myself, and also decided to fix or finish everyone else's programs. My little four-month project turned into a two-year project. And the irony is that I really didn't do much programming: the majority of my time was spent figuring out which randomly selected sets of version upgrades, service packs, and DLLs are compatible with one another, or figuring out how to work around the workarounds for long-standing bugs in the third-party products we're using, or telling the client what computer and networking hardware to buy and how to configure it. (See RealStoryAboutDeveloperTurnedManager for the details.)

I've been working sixty hours a week for those two years, without any vacation. I've broken off contact with friends and family. There is no "high" from programming anymore--I'm now in a constant state of frustration and fatigue.

And it is not just the frustrations of programming that bother me. I am torturing myself to create systems that seemingly don't solve any problems nor improve anyone's life in any way.

I've finally accepted that my life has become unmanageable. I am powerless over computers and their hold on me.

I now realize that ProgrammingIsNotFun and SoftwareIsReallyPointless. I really shouldn't be trying so hard to turn my "complexity addiction" into a fulfilling career--it just isn't possible.

So, I am taking a break. I've quit my job. I will spend the next few months playing golf, playing guitar, reading non-geeky books, and learning to sail. I will use my computer only for what healthy people do with computers: e-mail and game-playing. When I decide to re-enter the workforce, I'll examine AlternativeJobsForProgrammers.

I'm so glad I've found this support group. (What? Wiki isn't a support group?)

i'm not sick but i'm not wellll

VERY NICE
i was stumbling yesterday and i found this,i loved it "ONE SHOT" ha wakhdeen balko , talk about coordination
this is a company's team doing this i remembered link.net annual video
also music selection is amazing to do something like this


i know i should have written something better than this after all this time of not writing anything on my blog but hey this is my Blog :P

kicked out of the office

today we were kicked out of the office as the cleaning lady is working there, there's no electricity in cilantro next to work i found out that i don't have a copy of the code i work on on my laptop we got lost following a car to a dead end street and we're staying in another smaller Cilantro where AC is not doing a good enough job

SALAMTAK YA MOH@LY

i don't know if i should call you yet i think i should wait a couple of more days till u feel better then call you

"Akeeed eedak betewga3ak delwa2ty" Alf salama 3aleek ya basha

Back to Cairo

by the previous post u've figured out that i have moved to Cairo to do work for my company spotlocal.net the next 2 months is the time planned to spend in Cairo to finish this project

when i left Cairo 6 months ago i missed it's outing and the junk food but in a couple of weeks i started to like Hurghada more

when i am here again in Cairo now i haaaaate the traffic things that should take 30 mins (Hurghada time counters) take at least 3 hours just because of the traffic


of course we had to take a nice drive from Hurghada to Cairo using Tamer's car and his generously helpful Friend (thank you Man) with all the needed equipment to work on this project we also recruited some nice people to help

this time we had to drive less than the speed limit for quite a few reasons

1. we had the fragile equipments in the cars trunks
2. tamer's driving license has been confiscated since the last time
3. there was a very nice traffic police truck driving @ the speed limit that we couldn't possible pass :)

"ma 3aleena" it was a safe drive


then i realized that this is the closest i have ever worked near my home i live & work in the same place which is nice this morning i wore my pajamas to work hehe (of course no one was there yet) but i always wanted to say that :)

a Day in Hurghada

i really do like working in the city of hurghada. at first i didn't think that it is possible for a web 2.0 based company or something that hi tec at all to exist in Hurghada, but lucky me :)


it is nice to have a company that is in a magical place like hurghada where u can have lunch in a nice place by the beach and go back to work with a clear mind (that is what u need for writing hardcore c# and AJAX ) nice this pic is in the morning b4 lunch


this picture is from a place called felfela where we go frequently to have lunch the place is amazing by the sea open air area, and it has a wide variety of food selection from "fool & Falafel" with all the possible variations and it has a nice grill and seafood menu also not forgetting the egyption Tagen and mahshi menu and also soft drinks



and back to work after being refreshed :P





photos taken by our fellow designer Mito with his N73

a MUST C Video

don't try to explain web 2.0 to your parents/Bosses
show them this

murphy's law

link1
link2

short version

"anything that can go wrong will go wrong"

Working @ home

i am working @ home late. past my concentration capacity, going to bed
i LIKE my job i like doing new stuff i like the challenge, i hate missing my deadline.

doing a compremize. i still wish i've done better

Bought three new technical Books Waiting for it to be shipped

Under Stress

Today i found out that i prefer to work understress than be a normal working man
seems like i am a workaholic

i don't know how or why, but it seems that i feel guilt if i am not working under pressure
i think it's a way that my brain says you are not working hard enough!!

ew3a el mooga

howa 3aref nafso

no comment

focus VS Interruptions

this weeke end i realized something that we live in a series of endless interruptions actually we interrupt the interruptions to live our life

this qualifies for playing Games , listnning to music , watching a movie even @ work

it's really hard to keep track of whatever ur doing yesterday i was playing NFS underground II i stopped the race used ALT + TAB to order from otlob.com then continued everyone in the house decided that i should answer the door and of course i had to eat then when we finished i played for like one more minute then we cleaned up

and when the race finished it said 4 minutes : 22 seconds which actually started just b4 the delivery man came and ended like 30 minutes later

i was playing a network game with my firends and this guy , i donno who he is a friend of a friend calls asking for e-mule settings which makes all my friends annoyed waiting for me to finish the phone call

same goes for work deploying an application Alo Ana 3awez kaza we kaman kaza 7'alass ok we ba3deen ana 3awez kaza we belmara kaza

yoooh 3awez a concentrate

First time i saw this pic i laughed for 3 mins

well i don't expect everyone to laugh @ it it's like a technical joke

a friend of mine Hassan has sent me this picture it's about software development cycle

for years and years everyone in the industry had a theory about software development

it's a cycle of events aiming for the release and billing of a software

well this is the funniest theory of all

the call

i am asking everyone to change his messenger quote to

"we'll make it work"

OK

we'll make it work me and my comrads will make work

it just has to work we can't take the blame for someone else's arrogance "is that spelled right?"

it just has to work

UDDI

i am recording the moment of us considuring to have a UDDI which is a universal discovery and discription interchange server

we have a lot of webservices and we're preparing for a large SAPs module

this is just a record to c if the idea will survive or get shot

one more thing

i would like to welcome the new team members

Abd el mohsen Basha

Victor Basha

i hope u guyz will be fine ammong the weird us

Hassan HUssien

MAN u're the best just quit smoking

Hassan was my friend and fellow developer we were co workers for like 6 months

the guy fought and fought for ...... lots of things

though we'll miss you in our team

man u deserve the best go just don't be a pmp

face lift

i came back to my work after a couple of weeks vacation

i enjoyed my vacation very after all it's the longest vacation i everhad since graduation
here i am sitting in a cyber cafe in alex the weather is great
i am thinking of work
i am now working on a |"face lift"| of mazika.com
yeah i know the term sounds like a plastic surgery

a face lift as we derfine it is a simple process of cleanning unnecessary code after many times of editing the original code and also introducing a new design

there's also another term
this other term is called |"Revamp"|
this one sounds a little like vampire's work i don;t know what the word means but it represents a full rewrite of the applucation having suffered the draw backs of the current instance of development

well
actually i did a total rewrite of the current functions of mazika.com and i also added new functionality to the website or create a website with the products vision

it's still called "face life" mayb just cuz i as a service operation developer did it , mayb because it's made in products technology not in linkdev

i am way pleased with the performance of my colleagues and from my point of view they just might be the best developers that can redevelop , revamp or facelift

i am totally happy with what i do no matter what other partries think

may b some day we'll really be appreciated and get the right flows of things for better business models