A theme in these blogs of mine is me hosting visiting faculty, which doesn't necessarily mean I put them up at Blue House. Sometimes that's how it works out, but I have limited accommodations. In this case we have a party of four and an AirBnB is involved. I was not expected to do any airport pickup at PDX this time either.
Given our shared background in computer stuff, our talk turned to FoxPro's having asynchronous event loop handling long before Python, as well as superior GUI design tools, more like Microsoft's other "Visual" products, especially Visual Basic (VB) and the full Office suite which eventually included Access.
Microsoft Access was an ambitious project to make VB the de facto cube farm standard in the corporate Windows-colonized sector. FoxPro, originally design outside of Microsoft, as a competitor to dBase (where I come into the picture, as humble dBase programmer at Project Vote).
dBase was bought by Borland as Microsoft thought xBase (the generic name for the dBase language) probably had a bright future, hence the strategic move to bring FoxPro inhouse and turn it into Visual FoxPro (VFP), of which I became a master (given pre-existing dBase fluency).
Project Vote, in case you're wondering, was a 501(c)(3) that carefully stayed nonpartisan even as it did outreach to specific demographic groups, mainly those disenfranchised by the pay-to-play pseudo-democracy kept alive by GRUNCH engineers. The legitimacy of the District's rule to some extent depended on people buying in, so even billionaires might see a reason to help us get more eligible voters, first through registration, and then through voter turnout (registering and exercising one's right are separate acts).
That Project Vote chapter was way back during the Reagan-Mondale race, with president Reagan winning a second term. I left the District after that, my housing having been work-related, and took up a position in a major publishing house, again leveraging my skill set as computer science savvy, and curriculum aware, having been a high school teacher since finishing my BA at Princeton (philosophy focused).
My involvement with Python came later, after years working with VFP around Greater Portland, both for state and regional governments and for NGOs, as a consultant. I was at first fielded (to clients) by the Center for Urban Education (CUE), then by Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon (EMO), then by Dawn Wicca and Associates (DWA), the partnership my future wife and I set up. Dawn was a skill bookkeeper and knew how to run our business, as well as take on fund accounting clients (nonprofits mostly). I took out the DBA of 4D Solutions and continued with the xBase programming.
Through CUE, I got into working for a vast enterprise, Sisters of Providence, or the Providence System however it currently brands. My boss, David Lansky, with a data science skill set, got me helping out with the Medical Data Research Corporation (MDRC) coding FORTRAN at first, and then Visual FoxPro, as I gradually introduced them to its benefits, and advantages over tools like Access. But Providence had a difficult hybrid environment where my applications (CLAIR and CORIS) had elaborate interfaces to other products. Yet I was merely a consultant, not a Providence employee. The ecosystem was therefore fragile even before Microsoft pulled the plug on Visual FoxPro in 2015, I was starting to see the writing on the wall.
Anyway, enough about me and my somewhat boring career compared to a lot of other people's careers that I know about. The visiting professor works with very high voltages, amps too, with a whole team of graduate students. We'll probably further engage in grid talk during the visit, although this visit is not just about talking shop.
Today I was working with the banks I transact through to get a payment ready to the City of Portland. It's that time of year, when we're expected to give back. I still do work as a consultant but since switching to Python teaching from VFP custom applications design, I've been mostly teaching people out-of-area. I was doing this well before Covid. Right before covid though, or as the pandemic came on, I was working with a startup focused on new curriculum implementation, reminding me of work at the publishing house in New York, after the Project Vote experience.
I consider myself a curriculum designer, and have lots of experience to back that up, including as a code school faculty member with O'Reilly for some years. I go into all that in more detail in these blogs and in my photostream on Flickr.
