From IT to ITU … and back … sorta
I retrained as a nurse in 2015 (I work in an NHS hospital on the South coast of England in ITU)
Prior to this I had a career in IT (in a wide variety of roles) for the best part of 30 years (Sadly I’m no spring chicken!). Whilst IT was intellectually engaging and well paid, I found that it did not “feed my soul”. Nursing (especially in ITU) does; it is intellectually engaging, sadly the pay is … not reflective of what we do.
The first IT project that actually put some money in my purse (in the early 80s) was on a SuperBrain CP/M machine in BASIC, an accounting system that did merge sorting using … two 360Kb disk drives!
I still fondly recall my first TSR Dos program (A clock shoehorned in via Int 21 I think) and state of the art was more or less an Olivetti M24 running against a Novell server.
I remember having an external hard drive, with interchangeable storage platters that held a massive … 5Mb! … wow!
A large part of my work over the following decades was Microsoft based (Tho in the mid 90s I worked in Auckland for IBM on a system that was trying to use every … single … IBM … technology … that existed! On the plus side I got to work with Richard Helm, one of the GOF!).
At the time I left IT, I migrated to an Apple ecosystem; I realise it is not for everyone, but I love the integration of my desktop/laptop/tablet & phone. I like the UX and the “je ne sais quoi” that I feel their products have.
Sadly (like so many colleagues) in the middle of 2020 I experienced burnout (Largely due to the insane Covid-19 workload) and during this period I started to re-engage with some development; I found it relaxing (Perhaps because I felt I had some control). I’ve been back at work (Nursing) for some while now, but I’ve still been doing some OSS(*) development recently in Typescript using VSCode (OMG … how dev tools have advanced in the last few years!) on my Mac Mini remotely SSH’ing to a Debian based server running on a Proxmox NUC. (You can take the girl from IT to ITU … but the geek remains); it is so totally different to the life & death scenarios that are the norm in ITU, especially at present.
I’ve recently treated myself to an Apple Silicon Mac Mini (Well, December was Xmas and my birthday and …)
For … reasons (That I cannot articulate) I decided to try something different. (I think that part of what I enjoy about IT is that you can always find something new to try)
I’m in the process of configuring an iTerm2/Neovim based dev environment.
In my early days I must have used VI because I’m finding that I’ve still some dim & distant recollection of the editing commands.
And … so far, it is brilliant!
The irony of having a state of the art GUI system (OSX is incredibly pretty IMHO) and using a console based TUI is not lost on me … but so far it seems that it is going to be more productive … and it is surprisingly fun!
(*) My OSS development is principally focused at present on ZigZag a Zigbee visualisation add-on for the amazing Home Assistant home automation platform.
I have zero intention of returning to IT (Nursing feeds a part of my soul that is amazing) but I shall continue to dabble with IT … and perhaps wax lyrical more about what I’m up to.
