micahwelf.us

Micah: A multi-talented hobby crafter, programmer, and former mailman.

 I am generally knowledgeable and usually good at whatever I focus on.  I was known as a versatile and effective letter-carrier.  I then moved to where the weather is very near perfect all year - and the neighborhood couldn't be much better in a world as diverse and scary as this world has become.  Now I am trying to re-establish myself in a career programming and working with computers.  Since I am so talented (humor), I decided to take a lifelong hobby and turn it into a business that I can do while I am studying for my new area of work.  So I also sharpen cutlery, tools, and almost any blade.  To support and enhance my studies, I also work as an employee, recently at Deseret Industries, as a security guard, and in night-time cleaning.  I also aid my family in the area.

What I do now

 For more information on what I do as a service, please click on "Make Sharp", "Software", or "American Maintenance" above.  This page is only meant to be a general profile for myself.  I spend most of my time working, reading, and assisting my family with repairs and maintenance.  I love my work and so I can put up with inconveniences, low pay, and general boredom pretty well.  I hear that stress and not enjoying one's work are big issues for some people.  I have only ever done work I found interesting, so I'm not sure I can truly empathize. 

 I have a really low grade photographic memory, but I have an almost automatic, historically bad recollection of indexing details - names, reference numbers, categories not easily inferred, etc.  Thus I know much and remember things I look at easily, sometimes without even trying.  This has been helpful for my personal studies, remembering codes, recognizing which keys go where, and scientific details related to my work.  It has been helpful in my performance in school classes, but not remembering people's names has not been so helpful.  I'm still concerned about that and have tried every memory technique and supplement I have discovered on the subject.  Only a few techniques have created marginal improvements.  The only supplement to have really helped was a Växa nutriceutical called Memorin.  The company seems to be effectively out of business, with NaturalCare (https://naturalcareworks.com/) attempting to cover at least part of their services.  Unfortunately, Memorin can't be found anywhere, anymore.  Not that I could regularly afford to buy it.  Nutriceuticals, dubbed by Växa to describe their then unique combination of herbology, homeopathy, and conventional medical science, were expensive.

Me and Postal work

I started working in the United States Postal Service kind of as a family tradition.  I worked as a casual letter carrier for about three months, then came back as a TE city letter carrier (still a temporary class, but treated the same as a PTF - career-class employee).  That was the best I could be, since that was just after the hiring freeze started nation-wide.  No career-class employees have been hired, other than those occasionally transitioned from Rural Carrier Associate, since then that I am aware of.  It has been a decade since I last checked, but going back wasn't really possible during that time. 

 First email, then competing package delivery, and finally the most recent big economic recession had taken their toll on the post office, and the post office was not adapting well to the first or the last.  Management has handled competition well enough, but how do you tackle a new form of communication that is near instantaneous, offers encrypted security, and costs almost nothing to the user?  I suggested that the Post Office take advantage of computer technology in a way that only 'we' were capable of, but I doubt my suggestion even made it to the post master of Seattle, because it seemed to me that management had mostly stopped listening to ideas that would require significant change.  It certainly didn't help that I was not Career class, because I wasn't even allowed to make my suggestion through the standard internal suggestion system.  I wasn't particularly concerned with receiving a reward; I just wanted the Post Office to grow again, so that I could maintain my support for my family and the community.  Now that the prime opportunity has passed, the nation may never see the Post Office integrating with computer-based communication.

 I quite working at the post office when I needed to change residence and had to change focus to a personally traumatic experience in my life.  After an unrelated injury, I decided that working in a physically demanding industry (Post Office in the Seattle area) was not going to be good for my future or my family in my long-term career, so I switched to working with computers.  I love working with computers, but I still have a long way to go before I can enjoy the kind of constant on-going service to the community and productivity that I enjoyed in the post office.  My aim, for a while, was specifically to work with computers and medical technology in hospitals.  Even if it would have been hard (imagine medical exams and IT exams), I felt that this was a good path to providing for my family and to really help and serve my community like I did in the post office, but now I feel that the way medicine is handled in hospitals is a huge obstacle for even the technical staff I might have become, so I might just prefer any programming away from hospitals.  I do love programming, scripting, and organizing computers in general!

 "Now I am still a USPS letter carrier at heart and my knowledge is sometimes very useful to others or myself, but I am also a cutlery specialist and a serious *mid-level programmer."   This statement is technically still true, but to be fair to current USPS employees, I am growing more and more distant from the US Postal Service.   I realize that I am much happier with any kind of independent employment (self owned small business) than with a structure that allows a certain amount of unethical behavior to go on with long-delayed official consequences.  The postal service is generally a collection of honorable people, but when someone does something wrong it is hard to hide it and, unfortunately, pretty hard to correct it as well.  Running my own business means I don't have to be subject to a randomly assigned manager or supervisor, so I don't have to deal with one misbehaving while a subordinate.  I am now an established cutlery service specialist, programmer, and business maintenance specialist (covering cleaning, handyman, and minor security issues).   There is more work for me to do than I can catch up with, so I lead a lonely work dominated life.  One thing the postal service offered was constant interaction with people, if only on a professional level.  This sounds sad, but, again, I'm actually happier with much less stress.

 * I am more of an advanced script writer, mid-level compiled language programmer, but script programs just amount to quick administration and very simple tasks because scripts are the least efficient way to get native instructions to perform custom, low level operations on data.  Also, it is my indecisive, widely distributed study of languages that has prevented me from calling myself more than a little above  a beginner in any compiled or virtual machine language.  I am essentially a do-it-yourself-until-it-works kind of programmer, like most long-term hobby-programmers, I suppose.  I have been developing a library to fix certain gaping deficiencies in Ada.  With a strongly typed and descriptive language as Ada is, I am surprised I am the first to take this general deficiency in user interface and operating system interface seriously. (Other programmers have addressed either UI or OS individually or only both together with a specific project in mind, but no general library has yet been made to make the interfaces work together and resemble the majority of the standard libraries that make most of Ada a delight in the first place)

My take on Computer Programming

 I love programming, particularly in Ada.  I have not found a better language to program in, though I have tried and examined many of them.  Ada is both a high level language - almost as high level as an OS shell script - and capable of very low-level constructs (inline Assembly Language).  In its functionality, style, and performance capabilities it is comparable to C#, Java, and Pascal.  C# and Java are virtual machine languages, so even though recently they can compile into native code, they have a bit of bulk and changing/growing libraries that interface with the native libraries, so they are not particularly low-level-capable and cross-platform support has not been very stable long-term.  Pascal is awesome and very similar in style to Ada, but it lacks some significant features and doesn't support as much low-level exactness and detail.  Because of AdaCore's support and software, Ada is very cross-platform and can easily communicate with applications and libraries made with other languages.

 No matter what anyone tells you, if you intend to be very good at programming, you have to learn at least a little  C (Linux and everywhere), C++ (Microsoft libraries), and Objective C/C++ (Apple libraries) - but I have never met, listened to, or read of a programmer who worked in both Ada and some other language who preferred the other language instead of Ada.  In fact, both my experience and that of others suggests that Ada should be the first language any programmer learns.  It's qualities are too many to mention here, but a couple of interesting highlights include:  nearly all of the advantages of the other programming languages, but easier to read, maintain and document;  it being well established with the top priority being long term stable and reliable programming.  [ Ada was officially created in 1983 under the direction of the US Department of Defense. ]  Where other languages allow bug-creating mistakes and a not-always-clear naming of libraries and execution code, Ada and more so SPARK (a subset and extension of Ada) will hardly compile if common mistakes are found and will quickly point the developer to the mistakes, saving many hours of debugging later.  I love Ada!  Even so, no general Operating System and native GUI library has been developed in Ada (*see note on business), so interoperability with other-language software is often necessary.<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

💡 My personal recommendation for aspiring programmers is:  Learn Ada well, then learn Objective C++, and then learn Python (**see note on Java).  This order will give you the most cross-platform and critical knowledge base to branch out from.  Ada teaches what simple experience in other languages does not, but there are not many jobs nor uses for Ada where most people wish to apply their skills.  It is thus a very may specialize as a very educational experience rather than specific job training.   Objective C++ teaches both C, Objective C, and high level C++ programming rules and concepts, and it is directly usable in career programming for Apple or Microsoft operating systems.  Python is required for many jobs and has the advantage of being intrinsically stuck between being a compiled language and a scripting language with elements of both evident within.  This makes it helpful in transitioning to a variety of non-empirical programming languages, including scripting languages.

 * For any business starting up with finite funds, speed of development tends to take priority, often leading decision makers to go the route that seems shortest though it may not actually be the shortest (C & descendants are fast to write, though slow to debug).  Also, a priority is working in a language that your employees won't have to learn fresh.  Since, for whatever reason, C and C++ prevailed in the early development communities, building an operating system (very involved and complex task) usually started with one of those languages.  Granted, C was the most well established and C++ was very similar and a big upgrade.  Ada just seemed too verbose and not well known to make it to the operating systems, and thus didn't gain use for most other general programming; it's often easiest to use the language the OS was written in for the benefit of long term support consistency and the utilization of standard OS libraries.  If any business was well established and interested enough to make a great new operating system in Ada, it might have been IBM, who created OS/2 Warp 4, known around the world as the most stable and reliable long-term supported  operating system ever.  Until it was abandoned by IBM, all your banking and important stuff was handled on machines with OS/2.  IBM might have stayed in the operating system market with a bit more than z/OS servers if they had something both unique and effective that did not share any code from Microsoft, was written in a language that could keep up with evolving expectations, and had DoD / Medical special interest; and that's Ada.

** Sorry Java lovers, this essentials list doesn't include Java because it is too big and beautiful — and not a true essential to getting started.  The only big OS that uses Java for its primary system calls is Android and that caused enough trouble that Google provided support for C system calls as well (the core of Android is written in C, so it is really a dual language OS).

  Someday, in the distant future and with God's blessing, I wish for us to benefit from a giant new operating system made in Ada that fully utilized several CPU architectures and provides full system library support for Microsoft, Linux, and macOS system calls.  Essentially, I would like to see a new library named Operating_System that makes a lot of assembly language and low-level calls per implementation, performing everything that current OS's do, but with a much better and more unified code-base.  If the computer code we have now survives the Lord's cleansing of the earth, I am hoping for this and better to replace the aging and disorderly systems we still have everywhere, so we can still reference and use all the old data storage, and better for the benefit of the work we will be engaged in.

  One little problem with this Ada idea of mine is that many features are essentially turned off (like tasking) when targeting a bare system, so both implementing those features in the operating system kernel, and re-implementing an interfacing runtime to support more efficient Ada programming for everything above the kernel would be the obvious thing to do.  I think it would be better to implement all the features of Ada directly into a kernel runtime and a client runtime.  This way the features of the language could be correctly and efficiently supported between the kernel and the application.  Right now, runtime support is often a crude and slightly slow process of using what calls and services are provided by the operating system that don't match the desired operation of the Ada language compiled application.  This means that real-time programming, timed operations, Tasks, exception handling, and sup-process spawning are severely affected.  Those are most of the flag-ship features of the language, so you can see why I might wish for a little consolidation for the benefit of both operating system behaviors and all applications that depend on it (not just my Ada programs).  Due to them being open source and very well supported, I suspect either FreeBSD or Linux will converted to support this Ada endeavor.  Any other less popular OS and usability will become an issue.  There are already some operating systems made with Ada and they are not usable as general operating systems because of specialization or lack of support.