Reply to post: Re: Old enough to have worked with the Virtual Machine Environment before VMware was founded

Re: Old enough to have worked with the Virtual Machine Environment before VMware was founded

Beta on VMware Workstation marked my third time through. First off was from the Masters of the time, IBM. I'd follow them around like a very young puppy. Second go was on mi Amiga on which I did hardware and/or software virtualization as well as emulating damn near everything around, microcontroller up through all the current microcomputers, most minis and some mainframes. And most of that was my efforts at the time being handy with a soldering iron, buckets of parts, and test equipment far too expensive for my tastes, but provided by the government, even if they didn't know.

I do love to read engineering manuals and related books. What business managers don't get is that I've seen similar solutions found in any field of engineering, and having a dozen under my belt, it's damn likely I can translate from one to another field of engineering. If the hardware isn't available in this particular case, be damned if I can't do it in software. That's why you find the beating heart of a naval air station's financials is using predictive analysis/modeling seconded from a US Navy navigation set. Don't tell anyone.

Did I tell you I'm a book junkie? Describe what you're looking for, I'll reach behind my head, pull the right book and open it to the rough whereabouts of the solution happens to be. [Annoyed the fuck out of my fellow graduate students when I stopped by the uni to top up some more skills.] So, refactor? Yep. If nope, re-engineer? Yep. If no, then get down to some serious algorithms and data structures analysis and invention. That's happened exactly once. Treat code as parts out of the bin, you'll make less, usually no, mistakes.

Where it gets all kinds of fun, and this is where things go weird, is legacy to greenfield transitions. Creating the templates and the code to take one to the other is where detailed accuracy is a must. Used exactly once, has to be bullet-proof, especially from the managers wanting to change the requirements. I can serve as the lightning rod taking the heat from them as I'm not going to be there next week. 'Sides, I abuse as well as I get. Being blind to social shit is nice for this. Don't care how many stars you have on your collar or that you have a limo or private jet pick you up or drop you off.

Anyway, I'm not looking for a permanent gig anywhere. The tumbleweed life suits me far better on both sides. That's about to end. Work from bed is staring me in the face. Age & disability {sigh}. Been fun. Guess I find out about that kind of work.