Have you ever wondered how well do people do in apprenticeship and coaching programs? Well, I am about to find out. I just signed up for a coaching program with a couple of outstanding copywriters. Both have hit the copywriting scene just within the last couple of years and have done very, very well.

At least well enough to keep you adequately housed, clothed, fed and deal with the ravages of $3 gas (especially since some copywriters have short commutes...from their bedroom to the office in their home.)

Now, I have a couple of assignments I am a bit behind on. Ooops. And they have emphasized the importance of putting in the work, keeping on top of it...so I fear a bit for my reputation here...as being slow.

So, why am I being so slow?

Let me go back 18 years ago. I was a software engineer working at Apple in their Quality Assurance Department, working for a 21 year old Manager who subsequently has become somewhat legendary in QA circles, Jim Bach. I should tell you that I'm not your typical programmer--I specialized in an area most programmers shudder to think about--assembly language. This is about as close to "hardware" as a programmer can get--and, in fact, I used to watch and debug electrical signal on modems...before Hayes came up with their famous AT command set--and changing modem operation by setting various switches...by hand.

The computer, as you probably have heard, only understands 1's and 0's--something called binary. The programmer writes code in text files, something which has to be translated, or for higher level languages like C, compiled, into binary. It was that piece of code, called an assembler (assembly code, get it?), that I was testing.

I had something like 65000 instructions to test, for the processor that was the brains of the Apple IIGS, the 65816 (big brother to the processor which ran the early Apple computers, the 6502). Now...how was I going to test them? By hand? Whew.

I came up with a plan: I would write a program which would generate assembly language programs which would test all the combinations. Oh, I forgot one wrinkle. This assembler had the ability to "assemble" the languages of 5 different, but very closely related, processors. So that made this task even more daunting. I discussed it with my boss, Jim. As he remembers it, he forbid me to do it. I don't remember that. I had a plan. With the help of someone to help me out with the C programming, I struggled and finally wrote the program.

The point of this story? I like to build "infrastructure". It took me longer to produce results, but the results I produced were a far higher quality. Any programmer who knows that there is code out there to automate what they do will strive to do that. In fact, they will get very, very frustrated at doing tedious tasks which could easily be accomplished, and accomplished more completely and effectively, with a few pages of code.

I just got my hands on some code which analyzes sales pages. It looks like it might have been written with Carl Galletti's input, but I'm not sure. Now, unfortunately, I can't take this code and create a program...yet. But once I do, I'll have something much more powerful to help me with understanding killer sales pages.

Live Life Fully,

zapseo  ¶ 6:41 AM