It's about time for a big, fat THANK YOU Martin and OF!

jedidia

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I didn't talk about it much on here, but a few here know that my live took a rather drastic and unexpected turn about a year ago, when I lost my job from pretty much one month to the next. Since I was working in humanitairian aid (technically in social development, which is a stage after humanitairian aid, but noone ever knows that term), this meant not only looking for a new job, it meant relocating my whole family back to Switzerland.
I won't go into any details about how this came to pass, fact was I needed a new job, I hadn't worked on the job I was originally certified for for 10 years, and another job in the line of work I persued the last 10 years was out of the question at the time.

What I did have was some decent experience developing add-ons for Orbiter. I had no idea how deep that experience was compared to what is expected of software developers in the market, though, so I signed up for a two-year school that offered the national certification program for software developers in 2 years instead of the standard 4, used up the few months until its start for brushing up on everything Web, because that was something that I didn't learn when making Orbiter add-ons, and went in search for an internship, which I found 6 months ago.

And then I began to realise just how much Orbiter had taught me. I'm not really learning anything new in school yet, and after some talks with the teachers, it turns out that I probably won't learn a lot of new things at all where programing is concerned. Currently my average is the best grade possible, and I don't even do homework...
And a few days ago, before going on christamss leave, my boss informed me that starting with January, My salary would be upgraded from an interns salary to a full salary... that's a payraise of over a bloody 100%, and results in the highest salary I ever had in my live. The financial concerns of me and my family, which were with us for the last year, are gone in one fell swoop.

And all that because somewhere around 2008, Orbiter inspired me to pick up an old childhood hobby again, provided a great API for me to learn the ropes, and provided me with a community that helped me whenever I got stuck, with advice, with code bits and some tutorials (I pretty much learned the concept of polymorphism from Martin's 2d panel master class tutorial, for example).

So yeah, it's about time for the biggest, fatest THANK YOU anyone has ever gotten from me save for my parents and my wife.

Thank you Martin for creating this simulator, for fitting it with an absolutely awesome (and as far as I can see, in gaming practically unique) API that gives modders the opportunity to use real code, and thanks to the community for all the times you taught me something new! :cheers:
 
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Notebook

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That's a real Xmas story, cheered me up no-end on a wet Boxing Day morning. Best wishes and good luck to you and yours.

George.
 

Enjo

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Can't you smell my T levels?
Have you already noticed, that code of Orbiter addons (possibly also yours), although some of them are crashy, is in general of much higher quality than the code produced by the buddies you work with, who are payed the full (or higher) salary?

Realization of this and failure to cope with it, leads to a burnout after, say, 5-10 years of work... but that's a topic of another story, soon to be revealed... :stirpot:
 
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Urwumpe

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Have you already noticed, that code of Orbiter addons (possibly also yours), although some of them are crashy, is in general of much higher quality than the code produced by the buddies you work with, who are payed the full (or higher) salary?

Realization of this and failure to cope with it, leads to a burnout after, say, 5-10 years of work... but that's a topic of another story, soon to be revealed... :stirpot:

Much worse, I have found out that we have people with much more care for planned software architecture than well-paid software architects.
 
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