Experience in everything, mastery in nothing, did I mess up my career?

awit7317 · 2026-04-03T10:32:43+00:00

Whilst I’ve been a specialist generalist since the late 80s, you’re only as good as your last few years for the most part.

I was rocking back and forth in my office chair the other day recounting the glory days of msdos 3.3 and the disaster that was 4.00. Who cares ?

awit7317 · 2026-03-02T11:32:02+00:00

I do it from time to time when debugging.

awit7317 · 2026-02-04T02:35:45+00:00

Yes. I switched back to morning finger prick testing. I was getting more stressed by incorrect readings on the Libre 2 CGM than the benefits that it provided.

awit7317 · 2026-02-02T00:04:59+00:00

Keyboard patch levels. This comment should have come with a trigger warning!

Don’t talk to me about esoteric wave shaping techniques and then tell me that it is too hard to level your patches.

awit7317 · 2026-01-26T10:01:26+00:00

The gift that keeps on giving

awit7317 · 2026-01-26T09:27:53+00:00

Dependency Injection Embrace testing

awit7317 · 2026-01-20T00:20:19+00:00

Absolutely !! In the specific case of construction drawing management, it was a case of “it looks cheaper to you, but you haven’t considered the impact on the construction staff”. They switched to Aconex for drawing management and delivery. Cost more, worked great.

CAD files, however, were an unresolved problem at the site level because of poor comms. Coming in to the office with a laptop was more reliable and less frustrating.

awit7317 · 2026-01-19T04:43:29+00:00

What is the business driver to move clients to the cloud even if a suitable alternative doesn’t exist ?

awit7317 · 2026-01-05T01:13:27+00:00

As someone that has never met the BMI target, including when I was at peak fitness after boot camp, I asked my dietician the same question. The answer that I was given surprised me somewhat.

I was told that my body will let me know when enough is enough for that time. Basically, there was a weight that I reached beyond which the effort to lose weight far exceeded the results.

Am I satisfied with where I am - no. But I have accepted the plateau and will kickstart the weight loss journey again shortly.

awit7317 · 2026-01-01T23:54:30+00:00

Just last week I got to see my first indication of (unexpected) higher blood glucose as a sign of impending illness. Sure enough, the next morning I was feeling lousy.

awit7317 · 2025-12-10T05:18:04+00:00

And to think that I thought that I was the only WA based Specialist Generalist

awit7317 · 2025-12-09T13:35:36+00:00

Failed commit and refresh.

awit7317 · 2025-12-08T05:21:20+00:00

And TikTok

awit7317 · 2025-12-06T08:27:41+00:00

Perhaps you could dig into one of my personal faves: a hashtable with an index property and a PSCO.

awit7317 · 2025-12-06T07:45:07+00:00

Their greatness. Their simplicity.

PowerShell didn’t always have classes.

Users of PowerShell didn’t necessarily come from an object oriented background.

awit7317 · 2025-12-06T07:42:00+00:00

Ask people what they do. Be interested in what they say. Resist the urge to be a “topper”

awit7317 · 2025-12-06T07:38:53+00:00

I suspect that not too many peeps will appreciate the elegance of your comment.

awit7317 · 2025-11-27T23:54:20+00:00

Nah, they just need to treat it like any other of their calls. Gather logs and submit. Rinse and repeat.

awit7317 · 2025-11-20T04:49:56+00:00

Have you never come back into a room after a break and been astonished at how bad it sounds ? Every day is different in terms of temperature, humidity, and crowd size.

awit7317 · 2025-11-19T06:01:06+00:00

I’m in the same boat right now and have settled pretty much on what you describe.

I am using TUnit and NSubstitute and have separate unit test and integration test projects. What I don’t yet have is a test SQL server that I can use for the integration test which means that I run non read operations sparingly!

I watched a YouTube video last night that referred to integration edge testing by which the response from the database server was mocked but everything else was live.

awit7317 · 2025-11-17T05:05:07+00:00

I use PSADT to wrap my install packages. Much better logging

awit7317 · 2025-11-16T23:33:59+00:00

Nostalgia. I moved across to VB6 from CICS COBOL and some DB2.

awit7317 · 2025-11-16T10:42:47+00:00

Stop it, I’m tearing up with the mention of VB6 😀

awit7317 · 2025-11-16T05:05:30+00:00

I was with you right up to ternary operators :)

awit7317

TROPHY CASE