It’s tough when you know too much :-). I am not trying to brag when I say that but the fact is successful Software Development has many “actors” and when you are only one person, those actors compete for attention and because of that I am not where I want to be today. I can not emphasis enough that infrastructure is key to successful development and while the cloud has done a bang up job reducing the time to get infrastructure for the back end. The “last mile” so to speak in software development is still problematic, that is this developer’s own environment.
I did not think I would get to the iOS side of the my app for quite a while because I am not a Mac person (anymore). I wanted to be, I drank the Kool-Aid in 1984 and bought one of the first Macintosh model. I was soon to be a, freshly minted, graduate of THE Ohio State University. I had visions of writing cool state of the art software; and this is where I learned that being on the cutting edge means you are on your own in the wild frontier, never knowing when a “hostile” actor will emerge to end your Davy Crockett aspirations right then and there. I always hated assembly programming and back then the options for developing professional grade software for the Mac were slightly above that. I had met my Alamo. Over the years I learned to recognize the snares of being on the cutting edge and the intimidation of them faded as I went on to break barriers and be the first in several software endeavors in my career. But I have digressed, again…
I was able to get my son’s old Mac Book Pro (mid 2010) back to a safe state as its battery was swelling to a dangerous level (props to my guardian angel who prevented another crisis from happening here). Replacing it was far simpler (and cheaper) than I thought it would be. It was this excitement that distracted me from my planned tasks. In other words my CEO hat was collecting dust and my Operations Manager hat was stuck on my head and running a-muck. All the while my Designer hat was yelling at me but my Operations Manager hat was pushed so far down on my head that I couldn’t hear anything. After replacing the battery, I wanted to set up the build server for my app. In the process of doing that I found that I needed a newer version of the Mac operating system. A version that is not readily found on the Apple App Store anymore. So I called Apple support and they gave me links get the versions of the operating system I would have to systematically install to get into position to achieve my mission. Needless to say I would kick off the process to upgrade the operating system and it would say it was successful but after a reboot I would be back where I was with no new operating system. This was a very sophomoric mistake on my part because I misinterpreted the “Installation successful” message as I am done (doh!). This error was magnified by my follow-up call to Apple support where the support rep made another sophomoric mistake which left my Mac with a reformatted hard drive and an inability to install the operating system correctly. Fortunately, I now have a path forward to fix the problem but, without going into details, I won’t be able to do that till next week.
My CEO hat has been resurrected from the pile and has given every other hat a dire warning that the Designer hat is in charge until his task is completed.
Image by: Marcus Hodges shared via Creative Commons license
My WineDb Journey 