Ben 6.0?

Tracking my software development:

This is a project that’s been in my head a long time. It may be the start of the “memoir” I’ve been contemplating. I jokingly refer to myself in various versions (I’d recently started referring to the current iteration of myself as Ben 4.0, but as you’ll see below, I forgot about some major OS upgrades (and missteps) that deserved their own release versions). I’m probably closer to Ben 6.0 by now.

Anyway, this is skeletal. There are a number of glitches and bug fixes that would give you Ben 1.1.2 that aren’t yet entered, so I expect this to be an ongoing project.

It’s for me as much as anything – you just get to watch, and maybe, just a little bit, understand me along with me.

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• Ben 1.0 – Born, Dallas, TX – 1968
• Ben 1.1 – Moved to Munising, MI – 1969
• Ben 1.2 – Younger brother born – 1970
• Ben 2.0 – Parents Divorce – 1973
• Ben 2.1 – Teen Ben “upgrades” self – goes from Benjie to Ben – 1981
• Ben 1986 – broke the naming convention – this is ADULT Ben – college, new life, new friends – and about as successful as Windows ME or Vista (remember those?)
• Ben 3.0 – First job post-graduation in Music Education – 1990
• Ben 4.0 – Leaves teaching, starts church music/pastoral work, meets future wife – 1995
• Ben 4.1 – Married – 1996 (you’d expect a complete new release, right? Nope.)
• Ben 4.2 – told my wife about my homosexual attractions – 1998? – this starts a series of 4.2.1, 4.3, 4.4, etc. I’ll flesh them out later.
• Y2K Crash – Not all software survived the new millenium unscathed. Nothing really worked right, and I went offline for quite a bit of 2000-2001
• Ben 4.3 – pulls it back together, covers up some bugs, but doesn’t really change the coding in any significant manner – 2002
• Ben 5.0 – “Gay Ben” is uncovered and loses church job – time for a new career – time for a new Ben – 2007
• Ben 5.0.1.2, etc. – this is a long period of attempting to rewrite the source code in a new language while still remaining a working product – VISUAL BASIC no longer cuts it. It required a lot of toggling back and forth between the legacy version and the new version – not an easy task and not the best way to develop a new product. 2007 – 2018
• Complete System Failure – Suicide attempt – December 2018
• Ben 5.1 – you’d expect a completely new version after a complete failure, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong. I just kept tweaking Ben 5 while working on 6.0 in a test environment. I needed to assure a relatively good outcome before rolling out the next version, so there was significant UAT going on. 2019-2020
• Ben 6.0 – Ben comes “out” to the world – 2020. It probably deserves special nomenclature – “Ben – 2020 Quarantine Edition” or maybe it deserves an entirely new numbering system at this point, because it no longer looks anything like the original. Core functions are new, and the UX/UI has been completely overhauled. Let me think on that.
• Ben 6.0.1, 6.1, 6.2… – lots of modifications to the new release in the last year. So far, I’m pretty happy with it.

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And the development continues. You can never stay with a version you’re happy with, because the environment in which it functions is constantly changing (upgrading?) as well, and eventually your stuff won’t run in it anymore (say good-bye to your Flash content, for example).

The work continues…