Yesterday, I commemorated the half way point in my life or possibly the 2/3 rd point , my family runs that spectrum. I feel like I am rushing to a finish line in a race that I should not want to finish. Life is just flying by. It was only yesterday that I was looking for a day job. Yesterday, I brought home my fourth guitar. A guitar which I have been waiting an agonizing 4 months for. The guitar is an Ovation 1769 – AD5 the Al Di Meola signature model. It’s a beautfiful thing, I got the blond natural finish. Yes, I wanted to be a musician, probably not terribly unique. So I looked and looked for that day job that would approximate the feedback that I got from guitar playing and especially from improvising. I almost gave up when I was shown mercy and was recruited from college by Florida Power & Light to do Smalltalk development. Now, I am not going claim that I can get that “immediacy” that I get from playing the guitar from coding in Smalltalk but it is as close as it gets and by far the closest any development tool , language gets, that I have encountered. The rapidity in Smalltalk of understanding one’s environment, of causing change in the environment and thus reacting to change, of conceiving and subsequently mapping those ideas to implementation is so immediate that it does remind me of playing an instrument. The power to create and change are really at one’s fingertips. Other environments that I have used always have hurdles, noise, contraptions that get in the way, they tire me. Yes, I am talking about the coding in the debugger experience, the lack of typing and the implications of that, the simplicity of the language, its readability, the “liveliness” of the environment and most definitely powerful IDE’s such as VisualWorks that out produce any other IDE I have used and that includes Eclipse, JBuilder etc. I know this has been discussed ad nauseum (sp?) but getting my guitar reminded me that I did find my day job after all. Now, I have to do something about getting that night gig :). The other nice thing about Smalltalk is that by the end of the day you are not so exhausted that one can’t put another 1.5 hours into practice.