More editing on Appendix A

diff --git a/appendixa.md b/appendixa.md
index 306b45dadfa07571ad3ae4b7dec79f6779fc97b6..83ffc6b397cb222fbbb35f8573e8729a7ee7299a 100644 (file)
--- a/appendixa.md
+++ b/appendixa.md
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ My journey as a programmer started when I was in elementary school. I became int
 
 ### FIXME
 
-Throughout my career I've straddled the divide between system administration and programming. My first jobs tasked me with maintaining various sorts of computers: desktop PCs, UNIX-based machines, and backing up the occasional VAX machine. It wasn't until one of my positions needed a website that my career started adding more programming to my resume. Programming websites taught me Perl, SQL, databases, and HTML. The web was so new that folks on our projects were all learning at the same time. I leveraged my Perl knowledge into several jobs doing web-based programming. Perl is a language that was easy to learn but could become very complex. Perl and CGI made it easy to get something onto a web page. Where Perl becomes complex is the syntax for things like regular expressions, and the tendency for Perl programmers to value code that does multiple actions on the same line. The Perl community also valued code that was clever, which lead me to wonder on several occasions if I was clever enough to be a Perl programmer.
+Throughout my career I've straddled the divide between system administration and programming. My first jobs tasked me with maintaining various sorts of computers: desktop PCs, UNIX-based machines, and backing up the occasional VAX machine. It wasn't until one of my positions needed a website that my career added more programming to my resume. Programming websites in the 1990s taught me Perl, SQL, databases, and HTML. The web was so new in the 1990s that all of the folks on our projects were learning at the same time. I leveraged my Perl knowledge into several other jobs and projects doing web-based programming. Perl in the 1990s was a language where the basics were simple to learn but the language could handle really complex ideas and data structures. Perl and CGI made it easy to get something onto a web page that had some interactivity. Where Perl becomes complex is the syntax for things like regular expressions, and the tendency for Perl programmers to value code that does multiple actions on the same line. The Perl community also valued code that was clever, which lead me to wonder on several occasions if I was clever enough to be a Perl programmer.
 
 One of the companies I worked at decided to migrate a Perl system over to a Java-based environment. They looked at the skills of the existing developers and decided they needed to outsource the project to another company. This was a common trend in the early 2000s for reasons that are outside of the scope of this book. This gave me my first taste as a team leader. I know a lot of programmers enjoy being in a managerial role but at the time I didn't feel I had fully explored my programming potential. I sat down on several occasions and tried to learn Java but it never clicked for me. It always felt more cumbersome than Perl CGI scripts that I created. It also didn't help that we were shipping .war files into a Tomcat system, which seemed like they were comprised of a lot of metadata and very little code. This is what I meant when I spoke about being OK with giving up on learning something - sometimes what we try to learn is more of a chore. Having something that is a chore isn't going to provide a good learning experience.