First. My mouse took this pic of the northern lights from a hill near her house a bit north and west of The Planet Ann Arbor the other night so photo credit to her.

Back to the title. Mainly that I am NOT a programmer (we call them developers today). I taught myself BASIC and FORTRAN umpteen bazillion years ago. I understand programming logic VERY WELL and if I know a language’s syntax, I can program like the best of the best. Back in my childhood job at That Darn EPA (I was a contractor), I once wrote a snippet of FORTRAN code to get our facility online with a monstrosity of a mainframe down in DC. NCC-UNIVAC. Awful system. Jeebus. Some person (guy probably [snort]) down there looked at my code and declared it SEXY. I *think* that was a compliment?

Fast forward to my adult job. I mostly write! In English, I mean. I code html, css, and a bit of crappy old-skool javascript but I am not a developer. The developers I work with kinda walk on water. I don’t even know exactly what language they are using now. I hear things like ASP.NET and C+ fly by and but I don’t work with that stuff. My friends on the dev team are the guardians of our little corner of the on-line banking biz and they are keeping it working and safe.

I could have learned to do that stuff in my Adult Job but I kinda like doing what I’m doing even better. My job is mainly to write functional specifications for the development team to use to build out new or enhanced functionality. There’s a lot of writing involved but as I am writing, I am not only thinking about verbiage and vocabulary. I am also making pictures. If words are not enough, flowcharts, annotated screenshots, tables or whatever often work.

I have always been what people sometimes call a “creative type”. This job is as creative as all get-out.

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