From POTS to TOTS

When I was a young my father had gotten interested in computers. He eventually started taking courses in programming and I believe he learned COBOL among other things. At some point he wanted to try and get work doing programming while maintaining his primary job and started a company called Programming on the Side or POTS. I don’t think POTS was a very successful endeavor though he did get to spend more time programming and eventually got a full time job doing it for a while before he died in 2003. He at one point explained to me that “on the side” had some meaning in programming in general or maybe in COBOL in specific (besides the obvious side-gig angle). I sadly don’t recall the specific meaning ‘on the side’ had in his explanation and can’t seem to figure it out with doing some searches. If anyone has a theory I’d love to hear it.

Influenced by my father’s interest (among some other important people) I also got interested in computers and programming which I love working on. Working on the internet on complex distributed systems I started to develop a skill for understanding the interelationships and solving very difficult problems. Much like House MD or the inspiration for that character Sherlock Holmes I found myself highly motivated by the rush of solving those problems. To the point that I sometimes regreted how much I liked it.

I still think my knowledge, skill, and experience doing that sort of work are extensive and I’m starting to think that I’d really like working on the intellectual challenge of creating an objective principle based system of problem solving. Maybe such a thing exists, but I don’t think so I think I would have seen it by now. As a matter of fact I think if it did exist in a completely objective form they’d require it as a basic course in the engineering colleges just like calculus.

I’m not changing my work by any means and have nothing to announce other than I’m going to start to experiment with some research in this area. I’m not fully convinced yet, but I think developing and then communicating something like this could become a central purpose for a decade or three. So I’m going to start looking into it as a sort of Troubleshooting on the Side for a little bit and see what I learn and share along the way.