Since probably around 7th grade, when I was 12 years old, I've been 
writing software in some way, shape, or form. Before that I *had* 
written some batch scripts, vbscripts, and maybe one VB.Net program, but 
those didn't really amount to much. The real goo and butter started when 
I was 12 with Telecom Inc.

For whatever reason, I decided to found "Telecom Inc. Software," and 
over the years I've written a bunch of different programs under that 
name (starting with the Telecom Web Browser - about the only real use of 
'telecom' there ever was). Most of them were in VB.Net, since, y'know, 
that's the only real programming language I knew other than probably 
BASIC and QBASIC. I really love it. Writing programs just feels so 
great, for whatever reason, and having an end result that I *actually* 
use is even better. My abilities are constantly getting better and 
better, and I really just enjoy what I do. I'm even getting paid for it 
this summer, working on that Eudora Welty initiative. It's great. Maybe 
if I had jumped on the app train back in 2013 I'd be a millionaire. lol.

Telecom's basically been abandoned at this point, sadly. I make probably 
one update to it a year, and now that the CO.NR domain is dead, I'm 
probably just going to allow it to die off and move the only programs I 
bother to use anymore to a different domain (which is why I have three 
of my Telecom programs available on my sdf site - jebug29.sdf.org). I 
hate to, but y'know, I'm kind of tired of using a brand that doesn't 
even make sense for any reason other than nostalgia. It's not like I had 
any real users, and my beta testing team rarely even touches my software 
anymore (lol, yes, I had a secret beta testing team). Oh well.

But I did realize something recently: I've been writing programs on SDF 
without even thinking about it. I wrote g - my gopher shortcut utility - 
just recently. I also recently updated ChkMail (a program that checks to 
see if the user has any unread or new emails in their inbox). And I'm 
even still using a program I wrote to just check and see if anyone has 
commented on this Gopher hole on my comment page (which was written in 
PHP). And, sure, three out of four of those are just BASH scripts (not a 
real man's programming language like x86 assembler yar har), but they're 
still *programs*. That's the beauty of Unix: you can use pre-existing 
programs altogether to create an entirely new program. Use a combination 
of wc and mail and you can get how many e-mails are in your inbox. 
Redirect a user to a gopher hole using just a short input. It's 
something that's useful and nice to have, and they're all things I 
actually use and built for a purpose other than to build them. It just 
makes me happy to do so.

Also, supposedly as a MetaARPA member I can author system software, so 
is it acceptable for me to make something like g available to everyone 
or? I don't know much about this, and I haven't yet seen a tutorial on 
it (so I wouldn't even know which folder I would be allowed to drop it 
in). Input from some other members would be nice (via e-mail at 
jebug29@sdf.org or Mastodon @jebug29@mastodon.sdf.org or even the 
comments page on my Gopher).

Anyway, I've basically lost my train of thought now looool. Thanks for 
reading! Have a great day!

Also, if you have access to a fancy smanshy graphical web browser:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PvNs-QW1BY