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Bill Hogsett codes with CoolBeans

08 June 2019

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I am a retired corporate lawyer living in Cleveland, Ohio ten yards from Lake Erie. I got into computers when I went out to buy stereo speakers and they were too expensive and I came home with a Commodore 64. That was about 1982.

In 1985 I read Byte’s review of the Amiga so I got one, started an Amiga user group and started learning to program. I began with C and was the King of prototypes for awhile as prototypes were being introduced into C.

The user group did a group buy of the only hard drive available for the Amiga. Twenty-megs and we thought we would never fill it up!

One of the members of the user group had a business connected to the internet and did a demo for the group. I started getting on the internet with a 1200 baud acoustic modem. No web, only usenet, ftp and mail.

In April 1994, I, and many others, were the first recipients of commercial spam. A couple of jerk immigration lawyers had a solicitation for clients sent to hundreds of usenet news groups (newsgroup spam). I responded to the unwanted post saying that the group (comp.system.amiga) was for Amiga users and the post was unwanted. No surprise, I got no reply.

I like languages and got really good with the Amiga Rexx language. I wrote a graphic front end to the Byte online bulletin board. I used Perl for a long time. Learned HTML from a book while on vacation. I have played around with Java, go, Swift, Visual Basic(oh well), Python, PHP and a few others.

I started using NetBeans when I had my only formal programming training -- a worthless college Java class (pun intended) in 2011. Once the class was over I stopped writing Java since what I was primarily doing was websites.

My development environment is an iMac with CoolBeans, writing PHP based websites using Bootstrap 4, CodeIgniter with MySQL databases on the backend. I use TextWrangler for text editing. I am doing one site using CoolBeans on a Windows 10 machine for reasons that seemed logical at the time.

I am a hobbyist. I really enjoy programming, but I also enjoy duplicate bridge, and gardening. I am a political junkie, but I can’t say I have enjoyed it for the last few years(WTF). I tell my bridge friends that I don’t know whether I would rather play bridge or program. I have about the same number of books for each. But programming gets me out of bed in the morning and CoolBeans is my tool of choice.

I get paid for some of the websites, but that is really more for the site owner’s peace of mind than my desire to make money programming.

These two bridge sites are created dynamically from the MySQL databases: whistclub.org and d5bridge. This weather page is a mess—much of the code is not mine and it is definitely not Clean Code.

I can be reached by email. I am always looking for bridge partners!