Recursive Words

After getting up this morning and feeling decidedly second-hand (thanks go to my children for bringing the latest round of the lurgy home), I fired up my work computer and posted a note to the wider team that I would answer any immediate questions and then sign off for the day.

Only that’s not what happened, because I’m my own worst enemy.

I started out by looking at the status of some ongoing work (apologies for being vague), and that of course opened a rabbit hole that I fell straight down. Before I knew it, I was in the 11am team meeting, and after that deploying a fix to an underlying issue (I’m a software developer, if you’re wondering what on earth I’m on about).

While waiting for some tests to run in a far-away server farm, I busied myself with unread messages and emails, and discovered a video about an ongoing reorganisation within the company – and realised with dread that they were about to call out my name.

I have been doing what I do for 25 years.

My first reaction was “oh my word”. Sure, I might have figured it out some months ago – that the anniversary was coming up – but then it went completely out of my head until this morning.

I’m just thinking back – to where it all started – and thought I might share a little of my story with you.

When I left college, I worked for the family business for a year or so – a quarry in the cotswolds – mostly in the office, doing typical office chores – filing, payroll, and so on. One day – some time in about 1995 – the company accountant – who also lent his accountancy services to various other companies in the area – called me and asked if I wanted a “real job”.

He directed me towards a small company in a neighbouring town that were growing quickly, and needed somebody to become their “computer person”. I was hired immediately, and began the first five years of my career with computers – rolling out a network, Windows 3.11, and developed all sorts of quoting, scheduling, and database software that their business ran on. During my time there Windows 95 and 98 arrived, and ethernet became very much the standard for networking.

In 2000 I met a girl, and while figuring out about moving in together, started scouting around for jobs nearby – and dropped into a consultancy company a couple of miles away for a chat. The chat rapidly turned into being hired.

The next twenty-something years would take me all over the country to work on all sorts of projects – mostly related to document and content management, and business automation. For a while I became something of a unicorn, and found myself working in the depths of London for a couple of years (four hours commuting each day!), and then flying out to Germany almost every week for a further couple of years. During my time there we saw the arrival of Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10, and 11 – and of course the proliferation of Linux.

Away from work I tinkered with Linux from time to time, and picked away at a few open source projects – one of which – an early blog script – became accidentally popular. I can still remember the day an engineer in a huge corporate emailed me – “we’re just installing the blog script that came with our Novell servers, and have some questions”.

About three years ago the company I had worked at for twenty-something years got acquired by a much bigger company – and I finally got to find out if the grass was greener at a big company or not. I’m still not sure.

Since the pandemic I’ve been working from home too – something else I had always wondered about. I’m still not sure about that either.

It’s been an amazing journey – and I’ve had the privilege of working with some wonderful characters along the way.

Twenty five years though. Oof.