Hello everyone

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I'd like to introduce myself as I'm a new member here.

I've lurked on the forums for a few years, but only recently made a profile. Looking forward to getting to know others here too.
I was diagnosed with ASD when I was in school, and am currently figuring out how it impacts the way I work at my job. Perhaps a few of you can relate when I say that school was a breeze (academically - definitely not socially) and so being in a working environment has me absolutely stumped. Who thought open-plan offices and surprise meetings were good ideas? How do you avoid getting fired for revealing what you thought were innocuous opinions?

In my own time when I'm not curled up in bed in a depressive heap, I enjoy reading, writing, drawing, programming, listening to music, playing bass, computer games, horse-riding, and going out to do some archery. I also like stand-up comedy and hope that one day I'll be able to pursue that for fun.
Linguistics is my biggest passion. Being on the spectrum has given me the curiosity needed to investigate why and how we communicate with others the way we do.

What about you?

I’m into linguistics, too.

So are quite a few others here.

Welcome to WrongPlanet!

Welcome to WP! I hope you find it to be more pleasant than open-plan offices...and we have very few surprise meetings!

I also enjoy computers but I started programming in 1971 so I'm not current on the new stuff.

And I did not find school to be a breeze, neither academically nor socially. However, I did better in college because more of the courses I took interested me. (I used a lot of my "free electives" to take additional Computer Science classes.)

Welcome to Wrong Planet. I hope you enjoy your stay.

Thank you, everyone.

What kinds of programs did you write back in the day?

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I can see at least two plausible interpretations of that question. (I'm an Aspie. )

What did the software I wrote do?

I've retired twice from IT so we're talking about too many years to go through all of the software I wrote. But, a common theme would be "What the large organization I was in needed me to write." Usually I was part of a team working on a large government program so my software was just a small piece of something much bigger.

What programming languages did I write in?

My first real job was four years in the USAF. We programmed in JOVIAL on UNIVAC mainframe computers. After that there was a few months in a temporary job programming in Assembly language on SEL computers. The civilian career after that was for a government contractor. There I was initially on a project where we programmed in JOVIAL on IBM mainframe computers. After that I mostly used REXX and VBA.

But, in reality, my last two working decades were in computer security. On large government contracts. So what I wrote in was English. (Though I did sometimes use SQL and VBA to help me organize the tabular data for some of the larger documents.)

Now, at home, if I write software it is in VBA because my PC has Microsoft Office so VBA is handy.

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I'm old.

Welcome to Wrong Planet!

What's the reason for retiring twice? I didn't know it was possible to retire more than once. You learn something new everyday.

Older programming languages feel so much fun to work with. I didn't get to grasp the basics of various paradigms and complex data structures when learning languages such as Python in school. I did use a fair bit of VBA, so we have that in common.

What's the reason for retiring twice? $

Different jobs and different employers have different rules but sometimes if you stay long enough you can get some money or benefits afterwards. I think most folk who retire more than once do two jobs one after the other. I did them in parallel...but one was not full-time.

To be honest, I was tired and unhappy a lot. But I was persistent ^{Possibly an Aspie trait?} and completely retired at age 56...now I am much happier and I hardly ever use an alarm clock!

Oh, wait a second, I forgot! I do use an alarm clock every day. I'm old. I take pills. I have a small travel alarm clock on my dresser and if the pill bottles are in front of it I haven't taken my pills, yet. If the pill bottles are behind the clock then I've already taken my pills. I don't use the alarm on that thing, I just use it as a memory aid. It could do its job just as well even without batteries in it.

welcome!

So I will be 70 this year and have officially been some sort of programmer since 1980 although at that time I was already in my late 20s. The programming I did back then was in assembly language with debugging performed at the machine language level. I also did higher-level programming in connection with that, in FORTRAN, which was the only language I really knew at the time (I did learn Algol in school but never had occasion to use it). Toward the end of the 80s I decided to get a Master's degree (this degree was relatively easy to obtain at the time, a lot of people in my position went to the same school to get it, and didn't require one to write a thesis) anyway in that degree program I learned about networking, relational databases, artificial intelligence, and even a little about computer hardware (I already had an Engineering degree but this was more practical). I even learned Pascal (which is admittedly similar to Algol) the same time, the job market for people with clearances lower than Top Secret was drying up. I ended up in a job in which it was understood I would implement something in FORTRAN but was able to change that plan to implementing in C which is how I became proficient in that language. Later I learned C++ in the evening and continued to use it off and on until the early 2000s. At one point I moonlighted in a job that involved writing a lot of C++ as well as managing memory leaks (something I also got good at in my day job). Around that time, Java emerged and I was intrigued by the idea of Java applets and so taught myself. As time went on, Java became my primary language and I still use it almost every work day. I can remember the last thing I did in C or C++ (it was maintenance on some code that featured Embedded SQL).

I spent the first decade of the Century in private industry then went back to (civilian) Government contracting, when the Great Recession hit, and have been on the same contract now for 10 years. The environment I am working in now is Scrum methodology with Spring Boot REST APIs, Angular UIs, and an RDBMS. A few years ago I taught myself React and taught it (or tried to) to some other people but it then turned out I would be using Angular.

Being almost 70, I am aware that people my age aren't even supposed to be good at the sort of thing I do. Being a contractor, I can't officially be a lead but I unofficially lead the small team I am working with. Because I am actually writing code, I can give very specific help to others who are coding. I feel fortunate that I can lead a team of programmers and yet continue to program myself.

As for retirement, when I turn 70 I plan to at least cut back my hours. I will retire completely if told I'm no longer needed on my current project (which has gone on for 4 years) but that would surprise me. Nevertheless I am getting tired and aware I probably don't have that many years left. I am in a position to be able to afford retirement but as the US is moving into a recession I'm sort of glad to not yet be relying solely on retirement savings and Government benefits (in the US you can draw old age benefits and continue to work with no penalty). However I don't quite know exactly how I'll spend my time once retired.

Would being on the spectrum account for some of the unusual aspects of my career? No way to know.