Return to dark where shadows dwell

(Before I start this entry, I should warn you I am going to be blowing my own trumpet quite a lot. In fact, I will probably come across as a huge narcissist and leave you with the idea that I think I am the greatest human being whoever lived, and that the gods themselves show bow down in front of me and worship the ground I walk on.

Clearly, this is not the case. While I like to think I am not the worst human being who ever lived, I am well aware that I have almost inumerable faults and that sometimes I am remarkably hard to live with and deal with on a daily basis. 

I don’t take things seriously. I am overly sarcastic most of the time. My housekeeping skills are non-existent and the last time I tried to cook proper food I ended up giving my girlfriend food poisoning. 

All in all, I would say I am about average. There are some things I do well, and some things I do badly, and some things I don’t do at all. 

So keep that in mind when you continue on to the rest of it, because this is the last time I am going to be modest or moderate in the entry).

My father spent most of his life working in the defence industry, writing computer software. He is very good at solving problems and applying his knowledge to every day situations and to more unusual situations as the need arises.

My mother spent most of her life teaching foreign languages in various schools around the country. She can speak a fair number of them, and read and write in most of those. And for all the languages she is not fluent in, she can usually make a reasonable, if not informed, guess as to what people are saying or what is written. 

They are two of the smartest people I know (even settings aside what I said at the top of the entry), and I really am very grateful that I got to be raised by them.

After "The Darkest Day" incident, I spent most of Thursday afternoon and all of Friday working on The Customer Satisfaction Survey Project (CSS).

Currently it is an R&D project, but if it works (and we get suitable support and funding) then we can start trialing it with the various shops in The Hive and it could turn out to be something pretty big.

On Thursday afternoon, I had an idea of how I could write it, and two sample databases that would be loaded in to the system. And that was pretty much it – there was no application, no interface and no source code. 

By Friday – about 10 hours work later – the alpha version (this is generally the version we use for demonstrations and pitch meetings) was complete and fully functional. 

Jessie (the guy who will manage the project once it takes off) was very impressed and only had one or two suggestions to make it better. 

So – in a matter of just under eleven hours – I had written a fully functional, completely new application that did everything that was asked of it (for the first phase of development).

I am, on the whole, a very modest person. It’s not that I lack self-esteem, but that I don’t think someone should be too self-congratulatory or too smug about their own abilities, because a) it would make other people dislike them and b) it’s just asking for the universe to smack you down with a giant mallet.

Plus, I don’t want to come off like Sheldon Cooper. Because while he is very good at what he does, the fact he KNOWS he is very good at what he does is truly annoying.

However I think I am going to have to accept that I am a truly brilliant software engineer. 

Because the fact I designed and built an entire application in ten hours is fairly impressive in and of itself, but the fact I did it in a programming language I have hardly ever used before just makes it even more so.

This apparent (and even while I am calling myself brilliant I can’t help but moderate it with the word apparent!) brilliance is also showing itself in other ways – the DRM  system is written in another language I have never used before and yet I have whipped through most of the work assigned to me in record time.

Whether I come by it naturally, from my parents, or just from experience, I seem to have an affinity for programming languages, and an affinity for applying those languages to solve problems of various sorts. 

And given that I make my living from using computers to solve people’s problems – from monitoring the environmental systems in The Hive to writing a bespoke piece of software for the Christian Bookshop to show random bible quotes on their display monitors – it is actually quite  good thing that I am truly brilliant at it.