I left teaching in 1990 and started working with the Department of Social Security (now Centrelink or Services Australia or The Robodebt Guys) programming an Amdahl mainframe in Canberra.

Tasks were mainly COBOL and JCL (Job Control Lists) related.

It was dull and boring but it gave me an opportunity to teach myself Visual Basic (the Language that saved Windows).

I became a VB gun for hire in 1994 and for the next 6 years roamed the Eastern seaboard of Australia plying my trade as well as a 9 week stint at the headquarters of DTT (Deloitte Touch Tohmatsu) in Nashville, Tennessee.

I was contracted to Telstra in Melbourne for about 2 of these years crafting client server desktop applications (they weren't called 'apps' back in them days).

The usual workflow was to gather information from a desktop based VB form, throw this data at a SQL Server, retrieve it, modify to taste, and redisplay it. Rinse and repeat.

Tasks included front end design, SQL query creation, database analysis and construction and developing training materials for the software.

The late '90s saw me working on Run of Mine management information tools for some Hunter Valley mines (Howick/Newdell in particular). This introduced me into the wild and wacky world of Sybase's Powerbuilder development (now owned by SAP). You can read about a particularly funky solution to a problem we encountered here, on my blog.

I also got my hands dirty with some automated Excel spreadsheet reports, querying databases using VBA.

After this I worked at Port Waratah Coal Services for nearly 2 years primarily converting Powerbuilder applications to VB so we could head off the threat from the Y2K "issue".

The year 2000 saw me safely ensconced at Civica in Newcastle where I had my first encounter with a full blown Java stack web application running under IBM's Websphere (a commercialised edition of the open source Tomcat web server).

As a matter of necessity I picked up XML and XSL skills in order to increase my Java relevance.

Portable data and portable code was the catch phrase of the time. I'm not a Java programmer per se, but used an XML based java framework called Cocoon to compensate for my lack of java chops.

Cocoon enforced the convention of "separation of concerns" as in, keep the separate chunks of the application apart from each other. XML was the glue between the disparate components of the system. This was before the advent of Ajax in 2005.

Whilst contracted to Telstra in 1995, I worked with a very experienced, erudite South African gent in Melbourne who pulled me aside one day and said "Tony, we all sit on a developer spectrum, a continuum of personality and ability traits and you and I sit somewhere in the middle."

This was high praise indeed! He was basically saying that you have the complete IT asperger's, genius types sitting at one end of the continuum that cannot communicate with anyone but can program the crap out of anything using nothing but a piece of string, some chewing gum and a bottle of household bleach and at the other end you have the salesfolk: the guys and gals with blindingly white teeth who have no concept of the technology they're involved with but it is as shiny as their teeth and makes them money.

Most managers lie at this end of the spectrum - not all, but a great many. I'm happy with being placed in the middle: it means I know enough technical stuff to get me by and I can still communicate the intricacies of any given system to the great unwashed. I  think the South African guy liked my jokes as well.

I left Civica in 2007 and worked for a Canberra based Geo-technical consultancy from home in Newcastle. This gig brought me into the ASP, ASPX Microsoft fold and meant that I could dust off my latent VB skills and begin a slow transition into C#.

I still pursued the ideal of SoC (separation of concerns) and added SOAP into my development repertoire.

Instead of muddying my server based code with hybridised VB and HTML, I would use SOAP to query databases, render the data as XML and return it inside a SOAP package.

This seemed to work at the scale we were operating at (not that big but I'm sure it could have gone bigger). More importantly, it also meant we could write the back-end once and use it from different front ends: Web and desktop. I developed a Microsoft Outlook add-in that would use the same back end as our web applications. Write once - deploy many. It seemed to work fine!

A brief stint in the politically charged world of Life Without Barriers then saw me back teaching after 20 years in IT.

Without going into too much libelous detail, my short stay at LWoB made me realise that I had morphed into a dinosaur and was approaching my own Cretaceous extinction.

The one bright spot in this primordial gloom: I cobbled together a relational database system in Excel using a bunch of lookup tables and a large chunk of VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). I wish I had kept the source code, but that would be, you know, unethical.

Newcastle has a very fine University that conducts a quite well respected computer science program. This course churns out a bunch of young graduates every year, each willing to work for less money than I required, and being young, they can fake enthusiasm better than I could.  I'm not saying they were any more skilled or cleverer than me, they just looked better at doing it.

Gigs were becoming harder to come by in Newcastle. There was always Sydney but the thought of a daily commute thereto was a horrible contemplation.

So I decided to return to teaching.

This decision coincided with Kevin Rudd's "Digital Education Revolution" wherein the government spent billions on equipping kids and schools with IT equipment to enhance their learning experiences. Trouble was, there wasn't a lot of money allocated to teacher training.

The Catholic Schools Office in Newcastle had the foresight to employ "Learning Technology Coordinators" to facilitate teacher and student uptake of the new technologies. Right time, right political environment.

A lot of teacher reticence is brought about some weird idea that "the kids know everything about computers" and that the teachers would somehow look feeble and weak in front of the class if every student was using a device.

Read what I think about that here.

Basically, my thesis is that the kids don't know jack about the workings of the net and computers.

Like I don't know jack about how a car works except that it needs a key to run. Oh and some petrol. I think.

There were no schools willing to take on a plump, middle aged bloke who hadn't set foot in a classroom for over 2 decades, but a job did appear in the local paper for a tech support operative at a Catholic School in Singleton about 80km away. This could be my chance. I contacted the school's principal an at the same time reestablished contact with my former Deputy Principal at Aberdeen in the upper Hunter, who by then held the position as Assistant Director in the CSO.

Information about my past exploits as an education professional were exchanged, interviews were arranged. The stage was set.

I accepted the job as IT janitor in the school and the $40,000 pay cut that came with it. Means to an end, I would say to my (ex) wife Lisa as she would throw kitchen appliances at me (with some force I might add...).

Overtime I inveigled my way back into a full time teaching role. Firstly as a Phys Ed teacher - my extant education qualification - and gradually more and more technology oriented.

I had made the transition from plugging in network cables, swapping backup tapes and making up excuses as to why people couldn't connect to the network (telling them they're stupid was not an option unfortunately) to teaching kids how to throw chunks of code together to make the machines do something.

So for 10 years I taught IT related content exclusively. I was actively involved in getting kids to code and to become creators not consumers. I pushed the benefits of games development using Unity3D and general programming using Python and Javascript.

I like javascript. It has its detractors but it is a great first language, is ubiquitous and a snap to install as it is in every browser.

When I initially made inquiries about my lack of current teaching experience to the governing teaching body ( NSW Education Standards Authority - NESA) I was told that I needed to update from my 3 year Diploma of Teaching to at least a 4 year Bachelor degree. The Associate Diploma in Computers I gained after leaving teaching the first time didn't count towards a 4 year status as it was not education related. What to do?

I checked out what was on offer at the University of Newcastle but the best they could do was offer me a year of full time study to get my Bachelor of Education in Phys Ed so I cast my net wider.

The University of Wollongong came to the party with a Masters in Education specialising in Information Technology in Education and Training. I have an alley, and this was right up it.

The first 6 or 7 years of teaching were great (2011 to 2017). I got both the senior Software Development and Design and the junior Information and Software Technologies courses up and running and well subscribed by students looking for a career path that didn't involve adding to the climate debate.

After that it became much the same, year in and year out and I found myself yearning for a career path deviation once again.

The covid pandemic provided an opportunity to position myself for a return to programming with international travel restrictions and generally a dearth of developers in the market. Working from home was all the rage. I had a few interviews at various places for differing roles (mostly based around training and Moodle) but eventually landed a position as a junior developer at Plant Assessor, a SaaS safety assessment company based in Thornton - about 50 minutes from the Presidential Palace in Dungog.

Being a junior developer meant I was given slightly menial tasks at first but it got me into the swing of things as far as continuous integration, git repositories, code reviews and stand ups.

A lot of things had changed in the intervening years between getting off the Software Developer Express and re-alighting 12 years later.

Since my return to teaching, things were picking up in the web domain.
When I left software development, Java was the go to language of choice and the Browser Wars were slowly resolving themselves.
Ajax became a thing in 2005 and was rapidly attracting interest. Node burst on the scene in 2009 but wasn't considered production ready until a few years after.

Basically, all the good web stuff became normalised AFTER I left programming, so by the time I returned 12 years later, it was the biggest show in town.

This means that in the past 2 and a half years, I've had to discard any expertise I thought I had with the technologies of choice from the late 90's and early 2000's: VB, XML, XSL, SOAP, OS specific desktop applications etc, and had to jump head first into the deep end of Angular, Progressive Web Applications, React, NextJs, C#, BFF, Microservices and <<insert current full stack buzzword here>>.

The Conspiracy of Web Development Platforms as it pertains to my Employment Patterns:

Web Based Technology	When it became a "Thing"
Node	2009
Angular	2009
NPM	2010
Typescript	2010
React	2013
Next Js	2016

You'll notice that most of these innovations just happened to occur at the time I left software development and returned to teaching. Coincidence?

So, what have I added to my knowledge bag of questionable brilliance?

• Over the last 2 and a half  years I've worked briefly on legacy AngularJS code. Briefly.
• Learned the basics of the BFF framework as manifested by .Net.
• Poked around and refamiliarised myself with parts of the legacy .Net Framework (my last exposure to .Net technologies was using VB.Net, ADO and an early version of C#).
  On the backend side, I've modified and created LINQ queries as part of API development for a SaaS product
• Incorporated webhooks using the PostMark automated mailing framework.
• We used Azure as the basis of the SaaS product we were developing. As such, I used Azure functions and eventing as well as Azure table storage.

DISCLAIMER: Much of my work here in the Azure space was "monkey see monkey do". I was basically taking existing working code and modifying to taste.

As of now, I am pretty confident and competent in maintaining and improving React code. I've been exploring the newish paradigm of Next JS, server side components and Application routing. I see myself as more of a front end developer than full-stack, although I have gotten my hands dirty maintaining and  creating API code in C#.

I'd like to think that I've moved on from the wide eyed innocent junior programmer of 2022, to more of a mid level developer, with a swag of stories from the good old days.