Getting the ball rolling. Which VB6 projects are you working on?

[Erwin69]

Programming is a hobby to me

To an extend it is for me. I always say that got my degree in a period the business people didn't understand IT/technology, and IT people could only talk in ones and zeroes.

I was trained to be the "translator" in the middle. So, I learned about computer architecture, assembler, Cobol, relational databases, etc. But also business administration, commercial, marketing, psychology and sociology. In the end I decided that the business end was more my thing than the pure technology side, so I ended up in sales & marketing roles, consulting and product and project management. But it has been very beneficial to have a solid technological background. Discussions with nasty IT-staff at clients who always tend to say that it's not their problem and try to overpower the non-IT people with technical jargon are cut very short when you start talking back to them in the same way. (I have many good stories to tell about this from when I was an account manager. ) And translating functional needs into software features without stepping on the toes of the development team is also a lot easier, as is calling them out on BS excuses when they try to wiggle out of a task they don't want to do.

When I started my own business back in 2006, I decided to use my experience to combine those all, and on occasions hire freelancers to fill the gaps. Over time some 20 business partners around the world joined my "virtual team", primarily to drive sales in their areas. This year I focus a bit more on product strategy and development, hence I'm around here more often. I still enjoy "rolling up the sleeves and getting my hands dirty" by translating my product ideas into software myself, even though it means that at times I almost feel embarrassed for the questions I have to ask. But most people on the forum are great in helping out!

I have a confession to make

Almost sounds like the start of an AA-session...

I hear what you are saying about the price to pay for the ease-of-use of VB6. In my simplified way of thinking, I compare it with using the macro-recorder in Excel. Easy to apply, but the amount of code that is generated vs. when you write it yourself is crazy. I guess that this is why there are still a lot of people out there (and in this forum) who dream of a "VB7". The challenge is that if you put 10 people together, you get 15 opinions on priorities, and maybe even more on how to get there.

In many cases technology, image, trends, etc. play a big role in what people ask for, completely forgetting to look at functionality and what applications are used for. Browsing the internet on a tablet requires something different than using office tools to create and update documents, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. I regularly get the question if my software works on mobile devices like smartphones. Yeah sure, you're going to create and update a visualization of a 3 meter / 12 foot section with 400 products on a 6" screen, dragging the images around with your finger... (See post #688 for some examples.)

So, in my case cross platform is a lower priority, yet moving from the desktop to a more cloud-based architecture likely will become more and more important. Unicode support was very important to properly support the UI in languages like Russian, Thai and Korean. Not sure if 64-bit will make a difference, yes for image no for functionality I guess, but with a lot of calculations going on behind the scenes, I guess that multi-threading and being able to use a GPU in addition to the CPU could be very beneficial. Time will tell.



Edit: added the correct post number for the pictures.