Your company killed your skill set

It is probably not intentional that your company is actively killing your skill set or maybe it is.  A better view is that they refuse to train you in any new technologies because of your age, or the fact that their applications you are maintaining are hopeless out of date, or change is not something that they want to embrace for business reasons.

Many years ago when my former partner discussed where the U2 (Universe and Unidata) industry is going, he believed that we would always make money as consultants.  Since most of our clients we were their IT department that seemed like a safe statement.  When the economy does is down cycle, then the first people that are out of work are the consultants whether you are running your clients business software or not.

Our U2 world with its plethora of "green screen" applications with the accompany tool sets written by staff that has a lot of learning to do.  Whether it is education of the current IT department, with seminars, or in-house training, or even enrolling in University sponsored, management must embrace it.

Enrolling in U2 University is a start.  But the learning at U2U is more of a walkthrough of current technology and will not help those who do not know what data objects are or even there is a format called JSON.  The web, the resource at your fingertips, is the best place to start.  Some programmers spend hours and hours reading articles and taking on-line study guides.

In summary, your company has a lot responsibility to have you highly trained.  But the question is will they spend the money?  More importantly, you have to push you company to embrace new technology and you have to have gained the knowledge to help them along this course.

ABS Brakes and U2 Databases

While my life experiences were flashing before me in the few seconds before my ABS brakes gripped the frozen payment in front of a stop sign, I thought how similar this braking system was to U2 databases.

ABS was first introduced in late 1920's by Gabriel Voisin for stop his aircraft without blowing tires.  It took until 1970's when Ford and General Motors first put them on mass production cars.  Around the early 1990's you could get ABS brakes as option on most cars.  ABS brakes took some where around 60 years to refine the technology for the masses.

The Pick database the precursor of U2 databases Universe and Unidata was started in 1973 with the release of Microdata version.  In around the middle 1980's Universe and Unidata we started.  We are 40 years in to this technology.  Hopefully, before the next 20 years main stream users, programmers, C-suite people, and the media will find out revolutionary these databases can be.

I believe we won't have to wait another 20 years to harvest this technology.  I, with my team of programmers, have created our suite of tools using Eclipse IDE.  Our XLr8Editor allows editing of programs, dictionaries, procedures, paragraphs, and data with built-in version control.  With our XLr8Resizer you can resize your account with a few click of the mouse.  Our XLr8Installer allows you to build a XML install script you can run to build you software accounts for your internal use or for your customers.  Our XLr8Developer and XLr8Object Editor the help you create these wonderful web pages using our middle-ware call U2WebLink.

U2logic offers free trials on all of our tools.  With U2logic there is no capital investment you just pay maintenance every year to get access to all bug fixes, releases, and email support.

Is there a Dinosaur sitting next to you?

Sometime in the near future you will look at your coding partner, or your fellow programmers, or even your boss and wonder if you are ever going to start coding like you live in this century.  It is something we must do every now and then when people find out you are coding in BASIC.  Really UniBasic is not Dartmouth BASIC which was created in 1964.  No we are using a language related to Data/Basic from its big commercialization in 1973.  It has some similar conventions as Dartmouth BASIC and the same thing can be said of JavaScript and Java.

If you write programs that, for example have variable names like "A" or "B", then the dinosaur is not sitting next to you, it is you.

If you cannot spell out the word count and use CNT or CT, then extinction might be right around the corner.

If we cannot name programs to match the functionality calling them Wh200 which should be something like Warehouse_EDI_Subroutine, then you are becoming a DoDo bird.

If you continually use archaic tools like AE (Alternative Editor), ED (Editor), or plethora of the other names strategically not mentioned, then you may find our self's looking for a job in a shrinking environment.

If you have seen the word "Version Control" but think you should save the old version of the program in a file called BP.OLD, the world is getting a lot colder than you realize.

If think that your editor should not be auto correcting as you type, then you cannot see the forest through the trees and maybe the T-Rex will not get you.

If we think that your manager does not know anything of how you do what you do, then you are in for a long winter this summer.

At U2logic, we are enjoying ourselves with state of the art tools and processes, so we are neither too cold or too hot.  Check us out at our web page at www.u2logic.com/tools.html.