What Is It Like To Be A Developer Stephane Jordi?
Hello. This article is part of a series where we speak with professional software developers, ask them what it’s like to write code for a living, and perhaps gain a few insights into the software development industry along the way. Our guest today is a Delphi and C++ Builder developer who has an amazingly impressive set of pictures of him smiling nonchalantly on the slopes of some absolutely stunning volcanoes at various locations dotted around the world. Stephane Jordi, also known as Steve, is a Swiss geophysicist who made the move from computer geek to computing applied to real-life needs. He specialized in monitoring solutions, first for volcanic activities, then for nuclear power plant seismic surveillance, and enjoys porting all tools to most known platforms. Hi Steve thanks so much for taking the time out to speak with us today – I think you just came off a long flight? Yes after this I am off to bed. I woke up 26 hours ago and am jetlagged 🙂 Which Embarcadero product(s) do you use a) the most b) regularly? I would say Delphi for my current cross-platform developments and C++Builder for scientific software. Since I’m involved in data acquisition, I need very low level access to digital boards and things like that. C++ is more inclined to do so as it is compatible with a very wide 3rd party tools environment. How and/or why did you become a developer? A little bit by chance. Back in 1980 (started very early), I bought a handheld calculator in New York and discovered overnight on the flight back to Switzerland that it was programmable. I had no clue what that meant. The idea that you could let it record and play back sequences of instructions was like magic. It was an HP-33C with 49 lines (keystrokes) that could be recorded. Then my High School was offering optional classes like cooking, theatre and also computing. That world was still very closed and not accessible. Believe it or not, but I came to software development using punch cards doing Fortran IV on big mainframes. I got hooked. Steve has incredible photos which look like they were designed to be desktop wallpapers Do you think you will ever stop being a developer? If so, what would be next? No. Impossible. Once you get this into your DNA, you just want more. I love everything that comes with development: understand a problem or a need, break it into small pieces, imagine what and how they would perform operations, write the code, swear a lot, and eventually see that it works. The road from complexity to delivery is marvelous. What made you start using Delphi/C++ Builder? I was hired for summer job by a company that had only TurboC v2 at the time. That’s how I discovered the C language and the Borland product line, from Prolog to C and Pascal. Then Delphi was released and I really did enjoy the RAD aspect of it. I did know Pascal so it was an easy jump. Then I used all flavors of Turbo C/C++, Borland C++ and then C++Builder which was a natural evolution to follow Delphi. I used Turbo C++ 3 to write my first volcano monitoring software in… Guatemala. I designed the full GUI framework under DOS […]
