The first working week of August 2014 comes ten years after the first working week of August 2004. You knew that. The first working week of August 2004 was the first week since completing my degree that I worked for a living: the start of a sequence of (paid) events that led me to here.
Obviously it’s not the start of the sequence at all, but I’ve already covered that story. It’s not even when I first learned Objective-C: that was about a year earlier. However, stories are easier to tell if they begin once upon a time, rather than in the middle of a collection of events, the connections between which being subtle and hard to examine.
It would be nice to give a recommendation to people who are in the position now that I was ten years ago, but it’s unlikely that the same things that worked back in 2004 are still applicable. Should you want to try, then my suggestion is this: bet your whole career on some apparently minuscule niche, and hope against hope that the only vendor supporting it creates a whole new industry within about four years so that your seemingly poor decision cashes out.
As an aside, you can draw clear lines around the things I was using back then that I’m still using now. Some of the lines are fuzzy: I’m still using “UNIX”, though that doesn’t mean the same thing (nor did it mean then anything that would’ve been recognisable to a user from 1994, 1984 or 1974).
It would perhaps be less nice to give a list of lessons that I claim to have learned over those ten years. Those would, of course, be lessons that I derive now from my recollection of that time, and would mostly serve to add to the corpus of folklore that permeates our field.
Which brings me on to the one thing I unequivocally do know after ten years in [IT, computers, whatever you want to call it]: that I still don’t know a lot. I definitely know more about programming computers than I did then, but that’s only an infinitesimal part of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.
