I'm still here. Not as often, but I am.

I started doing ISP work in the 90's. First for a friend who started a dialup ISP and I had some unix chops so I could be helpful. Then eventually working at an early broadband ISP as a sysadmin.

I had written some shell to automate the creation of DNS records. This was back in the days before BIND had a $GENERATE statement, so each individual ip address had to have its own reverse record entry. Growth was astronomical at the time so it wasn't unusual for me to have to add multiple /19's, /18's, even /17's in a week's time.

Running on an old sparc ultra 5, it took my crappy shell script (doing its math with expr) around 90 minutes to crap out the files for 32,000+ entries. I knew about perl, saw some people do a few things with perl, but I hadn't tried it yet. So I took that shell script and did an almost line-by-line rewrite of it (in all the worst ways) into perl. Got it working. Ran it. 32,000+ records took 4 seconds. I was so dumbfounded I generated the files with the shell version, waited the 90 minutes, diffed the output to compare it with the perl output, exact match.

90 minutes shell, 4 seconds perl. I knew I was on the right track.

Anyway, I also do not call myself a programmer. I'm not. I've met real programmers. I just don't have what they have. The day they handed out symbolic reasoning I must have been absent and had to copy off someone else's homework. I can kinda fake it, but I don't really have it. So I can automate the heck out of a lot of stuff. I've also written a lot of stuff that provides the glue or the conduit for when one system needs to talk to another. And I can use perl for all the things it's good at like ripping through voluminous amounts of data (logs, databases, you name it). But actually doing real software engineering, nope. Brick wall for me.