I wrote my first computer program in 1977. It was a little thing in BASIC that would have made my name scroll up the screen of a Radio Shack TRS-80 if I'd owned one (I wrote the program on paper, copied from a book), and I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever done. Fifty years later, I'm still programming—though the word itself has shapeshifted so many times I sometimes wonder if what I do today even counts as the same activity.

Back then, "programming" meant one thing: you sat down, you thought hard about a problem, and you typed instructions into a machine. The machine did exactly what you told it to, no more, no less. If the result was wrong, it was your fault. There was a beautiful clarity to that. To me, anyway.

These days, the landscape is—well, let's just say it's more complicated. We've got web designers who call themselves programmers, graphic artists who design user interfaces without understanding the platforms they're designing for, and now we've got AI that will write code for you if you just describe what you want in plain English. The question "What is programming?" has never been harder to answer, or more interesting to think about.

This section is my attempt to wrestle with that question, and a few related ones. Not as an academic exercise—I've never been much for those—but as someone who's been in the trenches long enough to have opinions. Strong ones, occasionally. You've been warned!

If you're a programmer, you might find some of this familiar. If you're not, don't worry—I've spent decades explaining this stuff to people, and I promise to keep the jargon to a minimum. The ideas are what matter, and those belong to everybody.

What Is a Program, Anyway?

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 3/14/2026		Page Views: 56
Hashtags: #softwaredevelopment #program
The word 'program' had a rich life long before computers claimed it. From county fairs to concert halls to cubicles, tracing how the meaning evolved.
Estimated reading time: 6 minute(s) (1211 words)

Before we can talk about computer programming, we should probably talk about the word program itself—because it had a perfectly respectable career for centuries before anyone ever plugged in a monitor.

Your Builds Don't Need OneDrive!

By: Paul S Cilwa	Posted: 3/27/2026		Page Views: 138
Hashtags: #OneDrive #BuildFiles #VisualStudio #MSBuild #bin #obj #ProjectConfiguration
How to configure Visual Studio projects to keep temporary build artifacts out of your OneDrive backup, saving space and sync time.
Estimated reading time: 2 minute(s) (429 words)

Every time you build a Visual Studio project, it creates temporary files in bin/ and obj/ directories. If these folders live in your OneDrive, you're backing up gigabytes of garbage that will never be needed again. Here's how to fix it.