Hi

Hi and thanks for taking a moment to read this blog. Coolmain is the name of a castle in the south of Ireland but it has nothing to do with this blog except that I used to live in a house named Coolmain and I'm half Irish and it just popped into my head.

I prefer to call myself a programmer.  In the computer industry people usually say "Software Engineer" but Engineers have quite different training and I personally think they deserve to have their title respected for the disciplines and responsibilities that it represents.

I think programming is a bit like writing - there are many ways to create some piece of software - it's not like solving an equation and finding one true answer.  The art, such as it might be, is in choosing from the many possibilities, picturing the whole design and being able to imagine a way to get there in a series of tiny steps - like imagining a huge building and visualising when and where to put each brick.  You might compare it with "visualising an image"  and working out how to build it up from many brush-strokes.  There is art in your decision of what to make and also in how.

The difference from art is that these ideas must function in an objective sense - they are  machines - and that you can't show them off to anyone except other programmers.

I'll post some ideas that I had on this blog that might interest people and might not. At the least, writing them will help me to learn to express them well.