Never have I planned a program so much in detail before starting coding. And stranger still, I’m planning the program to be coded in a language in which I haven’t written a single line of code. Nonetheless, I’m eager and it feels good.

I woke up early this Sunday, my mind concentrating on the many steps I will have to take before the first project will see the light of day. I had planned eight prerequisite lessons before even starting the coding. And despite receiving many good pieces of advice, nobody had relieved me of my main worry — the input grid for the data entry in matrix format.

To speed up things, I thought of writing some auto-generated INSERT statements from the current Google Spreadsheet that I’ve been using. I would then at least have the basic data from the first two weeks of the year to play around with in my MySQL database.

And then it struck me: I don’t need a grid at …

Use PyObjC to code Python under the Mac Cocoa framework, and MySQLdb to interface with MySQL! That’s the advice I got in reply to my recent blog. The discussions were so inspiring that I spent all time when out running yesterday daydreaming about how wonderful it will be to rediscover the aesthetics of programming and regain the control over my personal IT.

So, to recap a bit of my thinking: Once a programmer, always a programmer. If you’ve learned how to code and to master your own IT life to a certain degree, you get used to it. At least I did. But then fate wrote a declaration of incapacity for me. Not only did I become a manager and got to do less and less coding. More aggravatingly, I changed operating systems. Gone …