The Programmer

About the Book

This is the true story of an ordinary Programmer who did extraordinary things. His career as a professional Computer Programmer began in 1968 and ended in 2017. Without any formal education, he was self-taught and very successful. That is, he had good jobs and made good money, not that he got rich or famous. A hard-core Programmer for 49 years, he never went into management or did anything else. Having had every title from Systems Analyst to Software Engineer, he still insists on the old-fashioned “Programmer” to describe his work. In addition to recounting his job experiences, he gives lessons in programming. These lessons are not so much about technology, as about the attitudes and behaviors that make a successful problem solver. He addresses himself to other Programmers, but it’s not too technical for general readers. He also talks about his long-time hobby of studying foreign languages and linguistics. There’s a little but not much about his personal life, but his life corresponds with the modern history of computers and programming. He was born in 1950, about the same time as the introduction of the first commercially available digital computer, UNIVAC I. He got his first job as a Programmer in 1968, programming a third generation computer, the UNIVAC 9300.

About the Author

Michael Di Loreto considers himself to be an extremely typical Programmer. Typical because his work was pretty much like any other Programmer. Extreme because he was so deeply into computer architecture and programming languages that he went far beyond what Programmers typically do. The title of this book, The Programmer, expresses both the uniqueness and the ordinariness of the way he did his work. Programming is a lot more than just coding. It’s also problem solving. Michael’s special problem-solving technique, although seemingly normal, is surprisingly rare in the world of programming.