Praxis

As you may know, though hardly unheard of, life long programmers are unusual and of course it's the norm for some such as tenured academics, researcher fellows in industry, etc. Here's the top level of my story.

1974 - 2018

This was the wage labour moeity of my work life, which is given fine detail starting with Praxis Tour which has a responsive bootstrap tour, c. 2015 with drupal sites for desktop and mobile devices, a cover page and 10 page resume, etc.. 1974 is the actual start because that's when I took training at the schools Control Data was running and actually did first programming, but I went back for a 4 year degree majoring in Math and CS and only had operator jobs until 1980. I did have a DP course at a community college before CDC in '73 which pushes it back to my teens. The Control Data Institute I went to btw, was in the building shown on the Bob Newhart Show at that time on Michigan Avenue as being where he had his office.

From the late nineties I mostly worked remote, but did work on-site in Buffalo in '14, and from the late 80s 60% or so of my work was on a contractor basis, by the turn of the century independent of job shop parasites. From late '18, for the reason explained in the next §, I consider this phase of working life ended, the last actual gig was spring '18. The character also discussed in the next §, together with a less than propitious childhood, lead to a less than stellar success in my first working life, as far as success is measured in money and the like. However I think it was a tremendous success in delivering me more or less whole, as a life long learner with a high IQ, and considerable depth of experience as an IT worker, to this point where I can work for myself, society at large, and free, open source production. Jobs I may take after this will only be on a remote fixed cost retainer basis and in relation to application of my ongoing Praxis.

2018 - †

The "domain" is the organizing concept of much of my work going forward, both for an independent peer-peer name system and the development of a standardized domain driven approach to development of applications, and in particular AI integration of applications and domains. One of these may well be what brought you here so see the supporting material for more information on same. The remainder of this § discusses the motivation driving my second working life.

From the earliest age, I have been resistant to authority, which for the most part, given the state of human societies through to the present, is generally illegitimate. Why? Because essentially every society up to this time is organized on the principle of domination of others in order to extract the value of their labor, make individuals conform to local belief systems, etc. Progress is ever countering this over the long march of history because it is inimical to human nature but paradoxically, in this time, en:Capitalism 資本主義, the doctrine of the extraction of value from labor, is also the one that makes it possible for individuals to be free of domination, if they can work for themselves. To the extent that it is organized for the well being of all the members, like a healthy body in relation to its cells, the authority of society is legitimate, and because this is the reason for society to exist at all, over time the progressive outcome becomes more certain and manifest.

I am very far from thinking that the acquisitive instinct is fundamentally wrong or that altruism is necessarily right. I definitely believe that selfishness which does not harm others can be a virtue, it's just that so far, a social form that makes it so has not been achieved and indeed the apparent trend is away from a high point in the last century, not as was thought then as a result of totalitarian socialism but rather as a result of the global dominance of doctrinal capital.

To paraphrase en:Deng Xiaoping 邓小平, it is indeed glorious to become rich, but not from the expropriation of the value of the labor of others and not at the expense of the optimal development of society at large.

About Legacy Content

Much of the legacy content had as its original purpose job seeking. To the extent that it is, this content is maintained for historical purpose and works where it works, e.g. flash (like the Old Web Portfolio), or areas broken by TLS (https), modern browser constraints, may or may not be fixed. Here are links that were formerly in the stuffs box to your left before this reorganization:

Agile Praxis		Ft Concept
Praxis Tour (linked above)		UI/UX Artistry

Since I've always thought of myself as an independent agent of production, a substantial amount of the legacy content has a historical relevance to current efforts.