My last day at being a project manager in biotech was yesterday. Now I have a new job learning full stack engineering and running my business JimmySoft LLC. This is a leap of faith. Let me explain why I am doing this.
I have always had an interest in computer programming. It started early in high school when I programmed on a teletype. It outputted code on punch tape. The computer that ran the code filled a 10 X 20 foot room!
My first personal computer was a 128K mac bought in college for $1200 ($3000 today). The street price was $2,495 so I got a deal. My my much wealthier roommate had a fat mac at 512 K. He had better memory than me!
I played around on the mac drawing things and doing homework. It was quite fun, but I was more excited about the graphical user interface. How was that done?
Soon Microsoft introduced excel and visual basic. Visual basic was like nothing I had ever seen before. You see it had a UI builder that let you create buttons, menus, edit fields etc on the screen. At that point I was hooked.
My first professional job out of college was with Dupont. Lucky for me Dupont was a mac oriented company. All the computers we used were mac.
My first professional program was a data logger which read 32 thermocouples at once. I had to figure out how to communicate with the hardware and parse the data for excel. It was back then in 1987 that my second profession, software engineering, started.
I have been writing programs ever since. Mostly I wrote programs for internal use to do research or commission a product.
I always had and eye on then next set of tools to get the job done. I mainly used Microsoft products and kept up to date with that tech stack. I started with visual studio 6 in 1997 all the way to modern .NET products.
It was in 2015 when I took this software passion further and started my own bootstrapped startup with EmbroideryWare. EmbroideryWare was a sensible product for me to make. I had spent so many years drawing things in CAD that I knew how to make the product before I wrote the first line of code. I spent 6 months of nights and weekends on it before the first version was released in June 2016.
What I didn’t know at the time was how hard it was to run a software company by yourself. I found out that customer service took the most time. Fortunately for me this time was well spent because my customers helped me make the product better.
My focus is now switching to the web and app space. With that change I have a new set of tools to learn beyond .NET. and I am really excited I am doing this.
So this site is a journal of my travels. It will have great technical content, as well as many funny stories along the way. The journey is the fun part. From passion to profession is the prize.
–Jim