I thought I’d hit a milestone in my career, but in writing this, I realized I was wrong. I’m a professional computer programmer, among other things. I recently moved to a Java development team, and I checked in my first code today. I thought it was my first professional Java code, but that’s not quite true.

I started out as a systems administrator for a mortgage credit reporting agency, and in addition to shell scripting and Perl, I also wrote a basic call center application in VB4 of all things using an Access front end. I moved on to becoming a software support engineer, but beyond a few patches in ANSI C, my repertoire was limited to Perl, with some HTML and JavaScript for my personal homepage.

I couldn’t get anyone to consider me for programming positions. One day though, a few years later, I was approached for such a position – because of that program I wrote in VB4! The hiring manager wanted a VB programmer with with previous mortgage experience. I wrote my first professional program in VB.NET, converted it to C# shortly thereafter, and spent the next decade as a C# programmer.

I’ve had brief stints in other languages. I’m often learning new languages to expand my toolset and to learn new ways to program. Right now, it’s Node.js. And, although I’m a programmer, I’m still a shell scripter, though these days it’s in PowerShell.

I’ve done some professional work in other languages as well. I wrote a scripting engine in Ruby for a C# web application. At another place, I developed an iOS application that exposed some service data – and then I deflated when I realized that I contributed some code to the Android application we made as well.

So, today wasn’t my first check-in of Java code, but it is my first with Java as my primary language.