Jon Udell wrote the blog "Jon's Radio" and the column and feed "Strategic Developer" for InfoWorld until December 15th, 2006. He announced his departure, to work for Microsoft, in his blog and podcast on December 8th. Jon continues to blog on his own site as well as for Microsoft, on Channels 9 and 10. Martin Heller will be writing this "Strategic Developer" blog, which will become part of the feed by the same n Jon Udell wrote the blog “Jon’s Radio” and the column and feed “Strategic Developer” for InfoWorld until December 15th, 2006. He announced his departure, to work for Microsoft, in his blog and podcast on December 8th. Jon continues to blog on his own site as well as for Microsoft, on Channels 9 and 10. Martin Heller will be writing this “Strategic Developer” blog, which will become part of the feed by the same name. In the spirit of Jon’s departure announcement, Martin decided to interview himself about his new blog. The podcast, alas, has mysteriously disappeared, but the transcript follows. Q: Tell us a little about yourself, Martin. A: I’m kind of a dilettante. As an undergraduate I got degrees in Physics and Music—I played the fiddle, sang, and composed—and I went on to a doctorate in high-energy physics in the hope of being able to eat on a regular basis. Along the way I got interested in computers. Q: When was this? A: I’d rather not say. OK. I think I wrote my first program in the mid-1960s—I was maybe 14—and started writing serious amounts of code in grad school in the mid-1970s. Programming became part of my first real job as a physicist, and became more of my job as an energy systems analyst and then as manager of the software publishing division of a research company. By the time I went out on my own as a consultant in 1986, I was starting to write professionally about computers as well as program them. Q: What about languages? A: I started with English and Yiddish, then learned Latin, Russian, Chinese… Q: I meant computer languages. A: Sorry. I started with hex machine code, if you count that as a language. After that, Fortran II seemed simple, and Fortran IV was absolute luxury. I wrote a lot of assembly language, too, when Fortran didn’t do what I needed, or I was using a minicomputer that didn’t have enough core for a useful Fortran compiler. Later on, PL/1 taught me about data structures, and Pascal woke me up to structured code. There was a very funny essay written in 1983 called Real Programmers Don’t Use PASCAL, that said something like “If you can’t do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can’t do it in assembly language, it isn’t worth doing.” I held those attitudes myself until I learned Pascal. You could say that I went from a Real Man to a Quiche-Eater in a matter of weeks. I wrote a lot of Basic on early Z80 microcomputers, then C when the compilers became available for PCs. My first book, Advanced Windows Programming, used C. My second book, Advanced Win32 Programming, used C++. My reviewer for the introductory C++ chapter was Bjarne Stroustrup, and he was both supportive and devastating: his gentle suggestion about class design made me rewrite all my sample code. I picked up Visual Basic, Perl, Java, JavaScript, and Python after that. Since the .NET Framework came out, I’ve written a lot of C# and some Visual Basic .NET. I’ve also picked up Ruby, and I’ve still got projects going in unmanaged C++. Q: What do you plan to cover in your blog? A: Whatever seems like a good idea at the time. Seriously, I’ll respond to new developments in the field when they happen. Right now, I’m following many of the same technologies that Jon followed, so readers should feel right at home. Q: How did you come to be writing this blog? A: Jon thought I might be good at it. We’re old friends. Jon was my technical editor at Byte Magazine in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Q: Where can we read your old columns? A: My Byte.com columns from 1999 through mid-2006 are still online, and with any luck they’ll stay online. It’s to Byte’s advantage to keep them where they are. My Windows Magazine and Winmag.com columns and reviews from 1993 to 1998 are also still online. By the way, if the music on my Winmag.com index page annoys you, just press Escape. (I wish I could go back and turn it off, but I can’t.) For anything earlier than 1993, like the first year of Windows Magazine and the years I wrote for Byte Magazine, or the articles I wrote for PC Tech Journal, you’d have to find the physical magazines in a library or go to an old CD-ROM periodical collection. Q: What about your other writing? A: There’s a short story on my personal Web site, called ‘Adventure,’ which you might enjoy. I think all of my programming books have gone out of print, but I doubt that any of my readers still need to learn how to develop for Windows 3.1. Q: Do you use Firefox, Gmail, and OS X? A: Yes, yes, and no. I don’t currently have any Macs, but I do have several flavors of Linux as well as Windows. Software Development