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I started a new job in September. Today, the company gets a new name: GemTalk Systems is now GemDB. They've been around for 40 (!) years.

My career has been about increasing developer joy and lowering the cost of change. Those are two sides of the same coin. The same principles that lower the cost of change also make for happier coders.

Now I'm doing QE on an object database where changing your code doesn't mean fighting your schema. No object <-> database translation! …It's pretty slick, and devs will definitely be happier. (Remember, the things that help human coding also help agentic coding.)

When I got my Master's degree, I really wanted to work in Smalltalk. When Apple rebuilt itself around NeXTStep, I got the next best thing: working in Objective-C. It doesn't have the same "always running" quality of Smalltalk, but it does have real message-based OO.