Welcome to the first edition of Ruminations. Like my boss and close friend Stu Stern, I too am a creature from an earlier age (the 80’s). It was a simpler time, a happy time, where we young programmers (no one called us software engineers back then) cheerfully nestled in our darkened subterranean terminal rooms, feasting on Twinkies and Jolt Cola and clack-clack-clacking away on the 3.5” high keyboards of our workhorse VT100 terminals, blissfully without fear of the yet-to-be-discovered carpal tunnel syndrome.

Bathed in the comforting glow of the 24x80 character monochrome display, we thanked God every day that unlike our forefathers, we no longer had to tediously keypunch each line of our program onto a separate card and submit the completed deck to the mainframe trolls for overnight processing before seeing the fruits of our labor – a thick stack of fanfold dot-matrix printouts.

The sleek DEC VT100 terminal, c. 1978

As with the developers of today, we lived in a period of rapidly accelerating technological change. However, through the years our collective commission hasn't changed. We’re still responsible for the Promethean task of combining a complex, usually ill-defined and ever-growing set of functional requirements with a truckload of inert iron & silicon into a living, breathing, working system capable of delivering value to the business.

In this series, I’ll be sharing with you some of the core insights I’ve learned as an enterprise software developer, architect, manager and consultant. My intent is not to be preachy or pedantic, but rather to encourage (or at least amuse) those of you who may be new to the field. It is my firm belief, borne out of both my own experience and that of many of my current and former colleagues, that software development – even of enterprise software - can be one of the most creative, challenging, and downright fun professions on the planet. I hope you’ll allow me to share a little of that joy with you through these articles.