John M. Jones
I am a software developer with too many years of experience to count. I spent the majority of my time writing software for the banking/finance/insurance industries. Now I’ve gone independent and get to be a little more choosy on the projects I work on. But they still seem to be around finance. I guess some people never learn.
jmjatlanta is everywhere
And more that I’m forgetting.
The long version:
I received my first computer somewhere around 1982. It was a Timex-Sinclair 1500. I borrowed the game “Frogger” from a friend, but that was the only game I ever played on it. Someone else gave me the source code to a word processor, printed on thermal receipt paper. Yep, you guessed it. I typed it all in. And yep, you guessed it, it never worked. I spent a large amount of time debugging it, and learned a lot about BASIC programming.
After mowing a lot of lawns, I bought a Commodore 64 with a disk drive. It came with a bunch of games, which I lent to a friend, who had a dual-drive Commodore 128. In an attempt to copy my games, he copied his blank diskette over my games. Grrrr. Oh well.
Copying the assembly and checksum program from Byte magazine, I copied every interesting program into my C64. It was a great way to continue playing with Basic.
My first jobs were with the Commodore 64/128. Inventory at a family-owned store, keeping track of customers and printing reports using Filebase. Fun times.
Then, I picked up dBase. And in particular, Clipper. That was when I moved into the “big leagues” and wrote more serious business applications. As Clipper faded, I switched into my dream language… ‘C’. Now I was closer to the metal. I could crash the computer whenever I wanted. From ‘C’ I moved to Java and C#, working in and out of C/C++ along the way. C++ is my favorite, and has been for a long time.
I am currently working in the crypto currency world, on Komodo. It is an exciting project with potential all over the place.
What’s next? I do not know. For now, I’m very happy working away on the Komodo core code. If/when that changes, I hope I remember to update this page.