I'm tired

For approximately the last three years I have been involved in technology for work. I wanted to get in so badly, that I would only apply at technology companies when I was first looking for more permanent work. At my last job I survived two layoffs, and that scared me enough to change jobs. I now work in a company where the investors play a huge role in who gets hired and who gets fired! I can't say if that's any better than only having one customer and if they downsize, then we downsize - that was what happened at my last job.

Anyway, I work in Software Quality Assurance, but my real passion is programming, and as such there is not much opportunity to really program in QA. I guess that really depends on what you're doing, but for the most part that is true. So for the last month or so I've been really down. I've mostly forgotten how to program, or at least I haven't experienced any good programming sessions lately. I want to put together a web site using HTML and PHP, so I got myself a host, and a subdomain name, and now all I need is to actually put something on it.

I kinda miss the good old days too, when everyone had to figure everything out themselves. I did a lot of Assembly programming back then, and now we get to use APIs for the same thing. I'm really not complaining, but it was kind of exciting to figure things out for yourself. With all of the options now, I have my doubts that I'll ever really learn an API very well. Otherwise I program in Java, which is a good end-all be-all resolution. It's very simple to use and understand. You can't really get into trouble with it. And it takes care of a lot of things, like the event loop problem of C/C++.

So I'm looking for opportunities to get some programming experience. I'm involved in two projects at java.net, one called PIEOS and the other called JCards. I'm hoping that these two will help me gain more confidence in myself again. I also have a lot of backburner projects that I've been working on, but not developing, like a new lite-weight cash register, and a recipe book. I just don't think in data structures like a good programmer does, and I probably need to take a review. Hopefully my personal web site will shed some light on my talents and abilities. I need this, I need experience, for myself and for my future.