Just had a release at work!

So, I have this nifty job as a Mac programmer now, and you've probably wondered why I haven't been posting about it much, even hardly mentioned the name of the company. Well, here's the deal: If a company has a reasonably successful product, its users will go to great lengths to bypass the regular support channels and get their feature requests, bug reports etc. to someone they think is nearer to the source, in the hopes of getting them handled more quickly. Which I fully understand, by the way, but it keeps me from programming.¹

And being able to just sit there and code was one reason why I hooked up with a company. There are people that will take care of negotiating contracts with hardware vendors, get packaging printed, buy and design ads and do tech support (with much more patience than I could ever muster). All this stuff is interesting, and I enjoy talking with the great folks at our company that do it, but programming is my heart's calling.

So, I've been thinking long and hard whether I should post any work-related stuff on my personal blog at all. But the truth is: My work is a big part of me. It should be here. So, I've decided to post about work. However, I'll keep it vague and general. You'll find no pre-announcements of products here, and I won't even post about stuff I'm currently doing at work. Only about stuff that has been announced and released.

Talking about announced and released stuff, one of the products I've been working on for the past three months has just been released. So, this is essentially my first piece of boxed software. Of course I'm insanely proud, even though there's no single piece I can point to that I did; this was a collaborative effort, and so it often happened that I just added a few lines in a couple places. One chunk of code I wrote also got completely rewritten by a colleague who'd had an idea for a faster algorithm.

However, I got in a couple nice GUI touch-ups, and got to improve performance in a few parts of the GUI, so there's enough small things that I did in plain view, which is quite satisfying. I've also had the fortune to work with some wonderful code. We have code in there that is already ten years old, but still perfectly working. It's nice to see such cleanly designed, sturdy code. Beautiful old code.

I encourage you to try it out. I hear the publisher will be at least demoing it at Macworld.

¹) In the first month at my company, I had one guy find my web site and try to sell my company computer chips. Which is pretty pointless because I don't have the slightest clue about the hardware side of things, and hence I'm not the person to make decisions like what chips we buy. That is left to the trained professionals.
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Reader Comments: (RSS Feed)

Mike Zornek writes: Congratulations. Glad to hear things are working out there, and your code is making out into the wild. An exciting feeling I know! :-)

Uli Kusterer replies: ★ Thanks, and right back at ya :-) Maybe I should so some "offline ego-surfing" one day and go into an Apple store and check out the boxes of our app there.

Or E-Mail Uli privately.