Ever since he was a kid, Conrad was the smartest kid in the room, but still played well with others. He grew up with a slide rule hanging on his belt, but mostly today it’s all about programming, from T-SQL to .NET, and he applies his wide experiences to solving business problems for his clients. A differentiator for Conrad, the developer? “I can understand what he is talking about, “ said one client. Huge.

by Conrad, the independent software developer

Here I am, riding down I-5 in California, really boring any this time of year with beauty reminiscent of I-70 in Western Kansas. But, I’m not bored. I have my laptop and my Sprint card – not to be used while driving – and the world is my oyster. I have my CrackBerry and my Bluetooth Motorola T505 that pipes my caller’s voice through my radio. My GPS can tell me how fast I’m going to the nearest .1 mph, how far I’ve come and how far to go – within 10 feet – and where the nearest Denny’s is.

Don’t kid yourself; what really draws folks into programming is the toys! We talk about our laptops like guys used to talk about their ’57 Chevys. V8 processor and 64-bit OS; 4 Gig of RAM with a Hearst Shifter; two 200-Gig Hard Drives and a 400-horsepower Intel Core 2 Duo Processor. She gets 2.5 hrs. per charge and goes from 0 to 60 in 4 nanoseconds. And this baby can multitask more things than that little Japanese guy can eat hot dogs!

To pay for them, I sell most of my time spent on them and that is a double-edged sword. Don’t they sell swords with a single edge anymore?!! Customers make me use them as tools when I’d rather be throwing rocks at trees. I don’t have one boss, I have 30! Fascinating as the technology is, I cursed my way clear over the Grapevine in Southern California when I got a phone call on my Blackberry: “You’ve got to hook up to the server. We have $75,000 that we can’t get to the bank in Omaha. It has to get there within an hour or it will cause a shortage we have no way to cover. Every time so-and-so tries to send it, we get an error message!” True story. I succeeded, but the electronic leash was choking me as we drove on a bumpy road heading into rush hour, deadline of our own at the other end so unable to pull over, and me trying to figure out what their problem was. Move the mouse, hit a bump, select the wrong thing, trigger an action I didn’t want. Carol, if I end up sending the wrong #$&!@@ thing, I’m going to kill something!

Now, I’m depressed. I hate these toys…