Today is Ada Lovelace day. Presumably it’s her birthday, which is why it’s her day. I’m too lazy to google it.
Ada Lovelace was, arguably, the first programmer. She wrote the algorithms that Babbage’s difference engine ran on.
The day is being used to promote/celebrate women in technology and such. Which is good. But it sort of served to remind me that I’m *way* out of that sphere.
It’s been over 10 years since I had a position that qualifies as Sysadmin, and at least 8 since I even had a technical job like server support. I do a lot of technical things in my job (analysis and report writing and excel wizardry mostly), but I’m in no way in IT any more. It’s not like I didn’t know that, but I hadn’t thought of it in terms like that. Ironically, it became fairly relevant today, as my team was trying to combine exported data from our tracking systems with other data in Excel, then get Word to do a mail merge off it to send out semi-automated emails. And I thought to myself “If this were 10 years ago, I could have just written a bash script that would parse the data, send it straight to the smtp server with all the commands embedded, and be done with it.
It’s sort of interesting to look at this group – the majority of us were employed together in some combination, doing some kind of technical work (we haven’t all worked together at any time, but all of us have worked with at least a few other people, and I don’t think there’s anyone that is more than one degree separated from anyone professionally. And of the group, it’s interesting how many people are still in that world, and how many aren’t.  I think most of the people on here aren’t in IT any more – Jake is firmly there, Enrique is, as far as I know. The rest of us are pretty much out doing other things. We still have a few friends that don’t blog here that are fully IT, but most of us aren’t there.
I wonder how many of us still self-identify as IT-types, though? I’m more of a stats/analyst now, and (shudder) a member of management (I’ve been a supervisor/manager for 6+ years now, which is about as long as I was in IT, counting from Tech Support through Server Support).
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