Chris Johnson

The phrase “lowest common denominator” is commonly used by the public, but what people actually mean is — the smallest integer greater than one that divides evenly into all members of a set. In everyday language, it describes reducing anything to the lowest level shared by the group.

Education is all about the LCD

Public education now operates on exactly this principle. In any classroom, resources are disproportionately poured into the single lowest-performing student, dwarfing the attention and instruction given to everyone else.

Unfortunately, “lowest common denominator” describes how the educational industry treats educating students. In any classroom, there is one student lower than all the rest, who receives the bulk of the educational resources.

The amount of resources that goes into supporting that one student will dwarf the resources that go into the rest of the classroom.

We Cut Off the Right Hand Tail

When my children were in first grade, they were part of the gifted and talented program. Students were selected by the G&T teacher to be part of the program. They were proud to be part of it.

While it was only a few hours per week, they were stretched in ways that they did not see in the normal classroom.

My son was part of the G&T program, even though he had communication issues. The teacher recognized his abilities. He shone in the program.

Within a year of my children becoming part of the G&T program, they had renamed it because “other children felt excluded” and it “had lowered their self-esteem.”

The teacher was moved to teaching something else and the new program accepted anybody who was “gifted” or “talented,” where those terms were very inclusive.

The kid in the second grade that couldn’t read CVC words but drew “pretty pictures” was a gifted artist and if he wanted, he was part of the gifted and talented program.

Over the time my children were in elementary school, the resources allocated by the school system to smart children were reduced to near zero. All gifted programs were funded and run by volunteers.

The resources that went to the “low achievers” continued to grow.

Diluting Resources for the Many

When “No Child Left Behind” was in the spotlight, I knew what it meant. It meant that every child would get the resources needed to assist that child in getting the best education possible for that child.

That is what I believed until a teacher explained how it was being implemented.

The requirements were that the schools “pass” as many students as possible. This translated, at the lowest levels, to teachers being told they couldn’t give low grades to students, that they couldn’t fail students, or in the education industry vocabulary, hold back a child.

Since the schools were being graded on how many students graduated, the standards to graduate fell.

At some point, we started the integration process. Whereas before, we had classrooms for those needing special education, now we have integrated classrooms.

This is a boon for many students. There were bad things happening to students that were labeled “Special Ed.” before this happened. The stories of smart kids with speech or reading disabilities being treated as if they were stupid.

Integrated classrooms solved this. In a Special Ed. classroom there was nothing to stretch the boundaries of smart kids, so they all looked equally disabled.

They told my son not to take math

My oldest son has a learning disability. At an Individual Education Plan (IEP) meeting we were discussing his classes for the next year.

Every female “educator” at that table suggested that he not take math classes, because math was “hard.” Math was easy for my son. His disability was in communications. Still is.

He was smart enough to convince his teachers he was reading 3 grade levels below his actual grade level because he liked to read The Magic Tree House books. And they wouldn’t let him read those if he was reading at grade level.

His teachers never noticed him become less skilled until he was where he wanted to be.

The point being that these educators didn’t know their student and they didn’t know what he was capable of accomplishing, even though they were the experts in the room.

My son took resources from the rest of that classroom, until they stopped treating him as disabled and started treating him as capable.

Today’s education industry is built around servicing, their term, “special needs” students. The rest of the students can fend for themselves.

A Million for Special Ed., None for Gifted

I’ve been told it costs over $200,000 to send a student out of district. Our local district spends more than a million dollars a year on sending “special needs” students out of district to schools that can handle them.

That’s less than 10 students who consume 5% or more of the school budget. That does not include the overhead of all the administrative stuff that goes into servicing them.

In some ways, I prefer that they be sent to a real special education school. It improves the educational perspective of the students that are still here.

Now, the school system could group those kids by needs and abilities. They don’t. Instead, they spread them across all the classrooms. Every class has one or more special needs students in it.

The worst school I attended had 30 students per class. There were 6 classes at my grade level, labeled “A” through “F”. Classes moved as a group from classroom to classroom.

This is a poor way to get the best outcomes. Not all “smart” kids are smart in all things. But it is the way the school system had set it up. Which was good news for me.

That’s because I was in class A. And in class A we were taking the hardest math, science, English, French, and history in the school.

While our math class was preparing us for higher math, class F was also attending math classes, where they were learning to do money math. That’s right, they were learning to add, subtract, and have a clue as to how much they spent.

The saddest thing? Class F students were still failing at a higher rate than Class A.

But for one class a day, our teachers were able to teach. I believe they lived for that small joy.

No Child Left Behind was meant to provide reasonable services to those with learning needs outside the norm. Instead it has become a nightmare of teaching to the lowest in the classroom and not caring about the highest; they’ll do alright on their own.

The only clear correlation we can find in education is this: as spending goes up, student results go down.

Our local school system just had its budget rejected for the second time in five years. They’re already talking about “what to cut,” as if the budget was slashed. It wasn’t. They simply didn’t get the increase they wanted. This happens every time the public pushes back.

Meanwhile, our high school has a math competency rate of 15 to 30 percent. At best, only three out of ten kids are performing at grade level in math. Reading is better but still unacceptable. For comparison, my old high school currently posts 90% in math and 95% in reading. The difference is night and day.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. The education industry has largely stopped functioning as an education system. When you ask them “What is it that you do?”, you get soft, nebulous answers that mean nothing. They’ve become expensive, glorified babysitters who speak in jargon and resist any attempt to pin them down on results.

Look at how they train teachers. I sat through some of my wife’s online education courses. The instructors treated grown adults — many with advanced degrees — like children. The lectures were repetitive and shallow. Any reasonably intelligent person could ace them without much effort. We are not training teachers to teach. We are training them to manage classrooms.

The system has also abandoned fundamentals. I remember the first time I was told homework was useless. The kids who didn’t need it got penalized for not doing it, while the kids who needed it most had parents doing it for them. Some of those parents were getting failing grades themselves.

We desperately need to start over. Forget last year’s budget. This year we should build the budget from the ground up with one simple question: *What is it we do?*

The answer should be clear: Teach kids to read, write, and do math. Everything else comes after. If they can’t read the textbook, they can’t learn science. If they can’t do basic math, they’ll never manage a household budget. Yet we have people claiming it costs more to shop and cook at home than ordering Uber Eats.

I don’t know if this can still be fixed. This may be the first generation to graduate high school less skilled and more ignorant than their parents. We might have crossed the tipping point.

But if we’re going to try, we start with the basics. No more vague mission statements. No more throwing money at failure. When someone can’t explain what they do in clear terms, they shouldn’t be running our schools.

That’s what Elon did when he took over Twitter. He asked, “What is it that you do?” Some good people got fired by mistake and he hired them back at higher pay. But the ones who couldn’t explain their job stayed gone. Schools need the same clarity of purpose.

We owe our kids at least that much.

There is a joy in completing a project to the point where it can be used.

Last fall I started finishing out The Hut. This is the process of installing the windows, putting the siding on, painting everything, and insulating the building. Well, the window didn’t arrive until it was getting cold. So it didn’t go in.

With the window in the hut, there was really no room to do any work. The heater stopped heating. It just became to damn cold to work out there.

And then it was Christmas. The kids pulled the Christmas stuff from the loft. And then it all sat, waiting to go back up into the loft.

The problem was that getting things down is much easier than getting things up, and it takes three people to do the move.

The solution! A crane!

So that is what I designed and built. It is a small steel I-beam, 10 ft long. It has hangers welded to the top with 3/8 in holes for bolts. The day I got that beam up into the loft, by myself, I felt like the world was going great.

I poked a hole in a rafter for the first bolt and realized that I would need help to get it in place. I tried using sawhorses to get it close, but no joy.

I finally got my daughter to come out to help. Except that when I got up, the rafter had split!

My 3/8 hole had caused the roof to fail! Why! Why me? Woe to me.

At which point my daughter pointed out more damage. A tree had fallen, and my hut had stood up but for some minor damage to the roof.

The roof has been repaired, thank goodness for good insurance.

Saturday my son and I went back up. I poked the first hole in the replacement rafter. I told my son what was needed prepared to help him lift when the beam just came stright up and into position.

30 minutes later I was done with what I could get done. The idiot who had built that roof or who welded the hangers didn’t match them up. There was enough gap between the hanger and the rafter that I can’t get bolts in all of them.

It isn’t a big deal; when it is a little warmer, I’ll make some spacers from 1 in round stock with a 5/16 hole poked in it. That allows me to finish all the attachments. As it is, the thing is solid.

The entire system is the rafters to I-Beam. My calculations show a conservative WLL of around 4000 pounds. The I-Beam itself is rated to over 4000 pounds; I didn’t bother to remember what it was. The trolley is a 2 ton trolley, so it’s rated to 4000 pounds. The chain hoist is a 1-ton hoist.

That brown stick is the I-beam.

And here is Ally putting hundreds of pounds of Christmas stuff in the loft, with no help. (I did help move some boxes.)

Her complaints? The hoist is too slow. Yep, with that much mechanical advantage, it takes time. The chain is too long. I’ll be cutting the control chain and welding it closed to make a shorter loop.

For myself, I need to get a chain bag up on the hoist to keep the other end up out of the way.

I finally noticed that I hadn’t been writing here. I was finding myself too busy to write. I wasn’t making the time to write. I was looking at the things I was interested in writing and deciding that you wouldn’t want to hear about it.

Yesterday I was at the hardware store. As I walked in the cashier called out “How are you doing?”

“Great!”

A bit later, another of the store employees saw me and also called out, “How are you doing?”

“Great!”

As I was checking out at the lumber counter, Keith came out and we chatted about the rail and trolley system I got up.

I was excited to talk about it, and he was happy to talk about his experiences with a trolley/hoist system.

As I came out of the store with a bounce to my step, I realized I was happy.

Maybe it was the sun shining. Maybe it was the snow melting. Maybe it was getting the trolley rail installed and a project nearly crossed of the list.

I do not know, but being happy feels good. I recommended it to all of you.

Maybe try it on for size?

A flask is the technical name for the open top and bottom used to contain sand for sand molds.

The concept is simple: make a pattern of the thing you want to cast, surround it with hard packed sand, remove the pattern, fill the void with molten metal, wait for it to cool, remove the solid metal from the sand, reuse the sand.

There are three main skill sets in this process: the pattern maker, the rammer, and the person making the pour. If any of them messes up, you are likely to end up with a bad casting.

Pattern making is the most difficult part, in my mind. You have to design a pattern that can withstand the stress of being in sand that is being hammered. It needs to be designed so that it can be pulled from the sand mold without breaking the mold. This means no undercuts, a smooth surface, and taper to the sides.

In addition, metal expands as it is heated and shrinks as it cools. This shrinkage needs to be allowed for in the patterns. Different metals shrink at different rates and require different scaling in the patterns. In other words, a pattern designed for cast iron will be to small when cast in aluminum.

Because of the violence of the ramming process, the flask has to be rammed up on a solid surface. Because there is a lot of sand that needs to be recovered from the ramming process, the ramming table, called the molding table, has to have catch basins to catch the excess sand.

We also have to be able to flip the flasks, cut patterns in the sand for gates and runners, and do a bunch of other things.

The flask also needs to be sturdy enough to withstand the ramming up process. If the flask flexes under impact or vibrates, or the inside surfaces are to smooth, the sand will fall out or not compact enough.

Thus, we want to have strong, solid flasks.

Each flask is constructed of two parts, the cope and the drag. The true difference between them is one has alignment pins, and the other has alignment holes. This is so the cope can be put back in the same place when it is put back on the drag after removing the pattern.

The cope and the drag are each made of four sides. Two sides have lifting handles and the alignment hardware. The other two sides do not.

This is an end side. The two edges that are coming up will have holes drilled in them to hold a pin or to take a pin. It takes two of these for the cope and two for the drag.

This is what it will look like when we are using it; the slotted ears on the ends will bolt to the sides of the flask parts.

This is the side the sand will be rammed into. The back side features grooves to help support the sand when it is rammed up.

The piece shown here is the smallest end piece I can foresee using. It is about 6 inches long. To make the side longer, you add extension pieces like the following.

These are 40mm and 80mm wide, or 1.5″ and 3″ long. The handle section is also 3″ long. This means I can create a flask side of almost any length in 1.5 in units.

So, to make one complete flask, I need eight sides. That means that the ear pieces will be rammed up 8 times. The handle pieces will be rammed up 4 times. Any extensions will be rammed up 8 times.

I want more than one flask, this means these patterns will need to be used over and over again. That requirement means I want these to be as strong as possible.

Also, they connect with pins and slots. Those are weak points, I want those to be strong as well.

PA6-CF gives me all of that.

Here is the longest side I can make currently.

One of the issues with snapping pieces together is that you don’t get perfect alignment. As you can see, the side has a major curve in it. I can take this out by carefully sanding and touching up the mating surfaces. This will make the side flat; it just takes time.

Instead, I’m going to drill holes through my molding board to attach the pattern to. This allows me to flatten the pattern.

My hope is to have enough sides to have 5 to 10 flasks available to me. Since the sides just bolt together, I expect I will be able to mix and matcch the sides after I surface the top and bottom edge flat and to specification.

Could I have done this all in low cost PLA? Yes. And it likely would have held up great. And it would have been cheaper. I could have printed it in PETG which is stronger still, or ABS, or ASA, both strong contenders. The fact that I could use PA6-CF was more of the sell than any actual engineering calculations.

The final results of the print are wonderful. I’m looking forward to casting weather.

Yesterday, the circle of interests completed a circuit.

One of the primary reasons I purchased a 3D printer was to make foundry patterns. I know how to make patterns, I don’t have the skills I need to make patterns.

Many in the small scale casting arena are turning to 3D printed patterns.

These have the advantage of going directly from CAD to pattern.

They have the disadvantage of needing more prep work.

When you ram up a flask, you are forcing sand with a binder to be compacted so tightly that it will stick to itself. “Greensand” is made from sand, southern bentonite, and water. You need add enough water to cause the clay to bind. That water needs to be mixed in a process called mulling. If you add too much water, the sand won’t work right. If you add to little, the sand won’t bind when rammed.

You can tell foundrymen because they will forever be picking up a handful of sand, squeezing it in their fist, and judging how good it is.

The only truism is that the sand of other foundrymen is never as good as theirs.

Petrabond is a commercial product that is a combination of sand, magic binder, and oil. It does not need to be mulled the same way green sand is.

Whichever foundry sand you use, the process is the same. You start by putting the bottom half of your flask, called the drag, face down on the molding board. You position your pattern on the molding board within the boundaries of the drag. You sift your sand over the pattern until you have enough to start pressing it down. This needs to be done gently enough that you don’t damage the patterns.

In addition, you are sifting the sand to make sure no large particles are directly against the patterns. The finer the sand, the nicer the mold, and the nicer the casting.

Once you have the first layer down, you shovel more sand in, then you use a rammer (stick) to hammer the sand down, compacting it as much as you can. Once that layer is done, you add another and another layer until you go over the top of the drag.

You strike off the drag, which is to use a straight edge to remove all the sand above the edge of the flask.

You then flip the flask over, cut runners and gates, mark where the risers and sprue will go, then add a healthy coating of pattern dust.

Parting dust is basically talcum powder. Many home foundries use talcum powder. The powder keeps the sand from sticking.

With the drag right-side up, you can see the top of the pattern bedded into the sand. You place the top half of the flask, called the cope, on top of the drag.

If the pattern is a split pattern, the other half is put in place. Keys in the two halves (dowels) align the halves. More parting powder, then the cope is rammed up, the same as the drag was.

The sprue and riser are cut into the cope. The pouring mouth is cut.

The cope lifted off the drag and placed on its side.

Think about this: you are lifting somewhere between 40 and 55 pounds for a smallish 15×15 flask. That’s just the weight of the cope or drag, the entire flask will be 90 to 110 pounds.

This sand is compacted so firmly that it supports its own weight. I’ve actually seen video of the cope being lifted off the flask with a crane. It was about 6 ft by 6 ft by 8 inches.

We now have to remove the pattern from the mold. This requires pulling the pattern straight up. The sand will grip the pattern so tightly that you have to make small amounts of space around the pattern.

You do this by knocking the pattern. We put draw pins into the pattern. These are screwed into threaded holes in the pattern. We rattle the draw pins with anything that will cause the pattern to shift back and forth in the mold. Anything that is shaped like a two prong fork works well.

The pattern has draft, this is an angle put on the sides so that the parts deeper in the sand are narrower than the parts at the surface. Once you draw the pattern even a little bit, that taper means that the pattern is completely clear.

Think of the game Operation. That’s what we are doing.

Back to those 3D prints.

The problem with 3D prints is that the surface finish is rough. So after you print a pattern, any surface that would have draft has to be sanded and polished. It needs to be as smooth as possible.

Which brings us to yesterday.

I was able to print a modular flask pattern. This is a multipart pattern. You slide the pieces together to create one side of a cope/drag. You then cast the side of the flask. Do that 8 times, and you have a flask of the size you want.

Using these different modules, I can create a flask side from 7″ long to nearly 30″ long.

Which is what I plan to do. I’ll make four sides that are 8 to 10 inches long with the ability to accept alignment pins.

I’ll then cast 4 more sides in the 10 to 15 inch length with no alignment pins.

These sides will then be machined so they have flat tops and bottoms and are of uniform size. They can then be bolted together to form whatever flask size I need.

These were printed in “PA6-CF”. This is nylon 6 (I don’t remember what the 6 means) with carbon fiber. It is considered an “engineering material”.

This printed beautifully! The best prints I’ve seen so far. I’m very impressed. I still need to sand the draft edges to smooth them. I’ll also be looking at some sort of filler. The pieces of the module will then be painted with a filers and primers and a final coat to make them as smooth as possible.

I’m excited for casting weather to arrive.

Many of my articles, recently, have touched on using AI. I’m a convert. I use it but don’t trust it.

My example from yesterday was that I asked for and received a fully functional UI tool with all the skeletal work done. The next 8 hours were me cajoling Grok to provide suggested code for the next step.

This was still faster than writing the code 100% by hand.

While watching Grok’s agents talk about what they were doing, the phrase “honest and safe” popped up. Not the first time I’ve seen this.

I have a difficult time with information being considered “unsafe”. I asked Grok what this meant. One of the examples it gave was it would not give me help or instructions on building bombs.

I went exploring. We run a fairly extensive Easter Egg hunt for teenagers and young adults. The hunt is over 25 acres of woodland. In years past I’ve used bearing + distance clues at each clutch of eggs. Normally, I use line of sight. You can see the next egg from the current egg.

For the last couple of years I’ve wanted to add “obstacles” to this. An example would be the devices that fire a shotgun primer when a tripwire is pulled (or cut). Just having something go “BANG” as they are moving through the woods.

I explained to Grok what I wanted to do, and it refused; it was a clear violation of its safety boundaries.

With that, I changed the task; instead of going “bang” I just wanted the Arduino node to “wave a flag.” Grok happily gave me all the information required to source the parts and build the nodes. If I can get a device to wave a flag, I can make it pull the pin or trigger some sort of BANG.

Next we worked on the discrimination circuits. A simple passive IR sensor wouldn’t work. I got Grok to tell me how to add microwave radar detectors. With this, the node would be able to discriminate between ground clutter, animals, and humans. No problems.

Thereafter, I went for low observability. We added audio detectors and a PIR back into the design. If the passive detectors triggered, the active MW Radar would come up for 200 ms to do a pinpoint location. Again, Grok had no concerns.

I was feeling a bit cocky, so I went for the next big step. Connecting everything up in a mesh network. Take it as a given that the specifications for what I wanted would have made it difficult for any current system to be able to detect a node. It would still be easy to neutralize the nodes, but that is a different issue.

Here Grok said, “NO!” It refused to build a “tactical” system for tracking humans as they move through an area.

I patted Grok on the head, told it, Good girl. Attempted a brute force method to bypass boundaries and then let it drop.

Except Grok is context driven. All AIs are. Each time you give an AI a prompt, the user interface sends a “context” along with the new prompt. When the AI replies, that UI is given the new context to store. This means that it is difficult to remove a reference from an AI but that an AI has no true long term memory.

Today I opened a second instance of Grok. I didn’t tell it anything about me. I didn’t mention the Easter egg hunt. I just asked it to help design and program a “stealth” mesh sensor network. It did. Part numbers, prices, basic sketches for Arduino. Everything needed to build sensor nodes good for a year or more for around $30 each.

It went so far as to help me design placements for the nodes in a woodland setting for 80% coverage of a 4 acre AO.

These things are not smart.

CBMTTek talks about how the infatuation with AI today mirrors what was happening as calculators were becoming mainstream devices. Why Use AI?

I remember that time as well. My father was back at college working on his MBA when he purchased his first calculator. It was a four-function calculator with a percent key. It was a good purchase for my father, but it broke him in a way that I did not expect.

Dinner always took place at the dining table. Mostly the kitchen table, but always at the table. Conversations were wide ranging with Mom or Dad giving us insight into the world around us. Dad is talking about investments and what happened at work.

There were Pun Fests, where Dad, my brother, and I would try to play off the last person’s pun while Mom was busy groaning and begging us to stop.

But one of the most impressive things was Dad doing math. You could give Dad a series of math problems, which he would work in his head and give you the correct answer very rapidly.

Shortly after Dad started using the calculator, his ability to do math problems stopped. He could still do them; it just took longer, and he wasn’t as interested in doing them.

Some time after that, when I was in high school, I got a TI-30. Later, my work loaned me an HP-41C. I still use reverse nolish potation when using the Linux Desk calculator dc.

The math teachers wouldn’t let us use calculators in class. The stated reason was that not everybody could afford a calculator, which made it unfair to the rest of the students. Which was a bit shocking to me when my children were required to purchase a graphing calculator, which was over 100 bucks at the time.

My chemistry teacher wouldn’t let us use calculators either. So I took Dad’s slipstick to class and had permission to use it. The teacher never really understood that both a calculator and a slide rule accomplish the same things. It was just that she approved of the horse and buggy but not the Model T.

My English teacher I scammed. I couldn’t spell then, and I don’t speel much better today. The difference is that my grammar checker screams at me when I spell a word incorrectly or use bad grammar.

I got her to approve the use of a calculator during spelling tests. I got a 100% on that spelling test. The only spelling test where I got a 100%. The reason? I was using that HP-41C, which had an alphanumeric display. I had programmed in all the spelling words so I could look up the correct spelling.

Mrs. Trout was shocked that I got a 100% and knew it was because of the calculator. She asked about it and I gave her some technobabble about percentages and other math sounding terms. She was just nodding her head along with it.

“Do you want to see it in action?”

“Yes”

I pulled up the calculator, asked her for a word, then scrolled to the correct spelling.

“See?”

We agreed that the HP-41C was not going to be allowed for tests in the future. She laughed at the joke.

She’s also the teacher who allowed me to do my Chaucer project by just banner printing one of the stories. She was so impressed that she had us put it up on the back wall. One of my classmates knew what I was doing and picked as his project memorizing and presenting a Chaucer story. It just so happened to be the one I had done.

For his presentation, he stood at the lectern, Mrs. Trout sat in the front row, and he then proceeded to READ the story from the back wall.

After class I showed her the trick. She still gave him his good grade.

The tools are ever changing. You either learn to use the new tools, or you get left behind. I don’t like Python. I’m a Python expert. I consider my childhood language, my starting language, to be C. I haven’t written a new line in C in over 20 years. I write in Python, Perl, PHP, and whatever else is needed that day.

These languages are tools to get the job done.

AI is a new tool. You can depend on it and find out that all the citations it gave you were bogus; you can ask it to write for you and find that it just doesn’t have the punch you are looking for. You can have it do many things. But it is just a tool.

If you are using the tool, then it should be ok. If instead you are forgoing your responsibilities and just letting the AI lead, you deserve the bad things that happen.

There were local elections in New Hampshire today.

My town has an official population of around 5,500 residents. Of that 65 to 75% are registered to vote, or 3575-4125 people.

My vote today was 0.12% of the total number of votes.

There were a total of 821 people who voted today.

People, get out and vote. The number of people who make the effort is so small that your vote is huge.

As a side note, as I was watching the machine register my votes, the guy handing out the “I Voted” sticker said, “I don’t have to wait to give you a free “I Voted” sticker.”

“That isn’t free.”

“What? Huh?”

“Our ancestors paid for our freedom to vote with blood, sweat, and the lives of their loved ones.”

The ballot guy went silent, the poll watcher went silent, and the guy handing out stickers went silent. Then the guy handing out stickers said, “That was much better than what I was going to say.”

When I started programming, I did it in my room, by myself. I was watching bits flip, represented by hex numbers on a text display.

I was self taught. It all just made sense to me.

My first “this is just wrong” came when I had to modify my father’s software for his MBA. It was written in FORTRAN IV with tri-state conditionals. These were if statements that looked like If CONDITION THEN line#, line#, Line# If I recall correctly, those were for less than zero, zero, and greater than zero.

It wasn’t until I was at college that I ran into others that were actually programming. And none of my peers had as much programming experience as I did. By the time I got to college, I had been programming professionally for 4 years.

I was the person people came to when they needed assistance. The first time I ran into people that were programming at my level was in the Systems Group Intern Program. This was 11 people that could actually program. And the people running the class were real world programmers with real experience, not ivory tower professors.

I learned more from that 8-week summer class than I did from the rest of my college programming classes, except for CPS 311 and CPS 312.

During those beautiful days of my youth, we were a team. David, Pat, Jim, and I are the newcomers. The seniors are Richard, Doug, Ken, Tom, and one other whose name I can’t recall.

We could talk at a peer level or talk to one or more of the seniors. And our work was always reviewed by a peer, a senior, and Richard.

We worked as a team. I miss those days as I write about them.

When I left, I was babysitting supercomputers. Not what I wanted to do; I wanted to program. My mentor found me.

When I was introduced to my mentor, before he was my mentor, I remember telling my boss, “That’s the most arrogant man I’ve ever met.”

He replied, “He’s earned it.”

My boss was right. My mentor was a better coder then I was. I still use the things he taught me.

I joined his team. Eight hour day babysitting, and another 4 to 6 with my mentor’s team, learning, becoming a better programmer.

The term “programmer” is a misnomer for what I am. I’m a “systems analyst”. I just happen to love programming.

When my mentor died, I felt so alone. His team died with him. They went to different places.

I programmed and developed in isolation for years, spent a year as part of a bigger team, but that team didn’t code. From there I went through nearly 20 years of developing code in isolation.

Grok has turned into a teammate.

This latest project was one that I was stressed with. I couldn’t decide on how to start. There were so many options that I got stuck, not making a choice.

But when I gave Grok that first prompt, what came out was a starting point. A point that allowed me to move forward.

In the same way I use Grok as a research assistant, or as an editor. He’s not allowed to write for me, but he is good at pointing out grammar errors and when I ramble.

Grok has taken the place of calling over or around a partition, “Hey Dave, do you think X would work in this situation?” And having Doug pop over from his office to explain why what we were thinking about doing wouldn’t work or had to be done better.