Good Point! Oversight on my part. I think that I take Code Project for granted, it's just there. I would be at a loss without my regular email shots from CP. It's not only helped with codeine etc., but I've got some blummin' good applications for free.

Happens to all of us. I'm in my fifties now, and Google, stack overflow, and text books are open constantly as I work. Still got all me own teeth, tho'. :)

After graduation I joined an aerospace engineering firm on their graduate training programme. A 2 year period of courses, working in various departments in the company, and honing my software skills. My mentor told me on day 1 "you think you're a good programmer, which you probably are, but you're not an engineer, we're going to train you for that", I thought "what does he know?" I learned so much. Programming is actually a much smaller part of software engineering. It's about the application of rigorous standards and processes to whatever you do, while applying a formal set of constraints. It's the ability to flow down system requirements to individual testable functionality, and tracing that all the way through to final acceptance. I spent 3 years in the systems engineering department. This was a collection of individuals with various specialisations; mathematicians modelling scenarios, and developing complex algorithms, for example. I worked on bid prep and requirements gathering and analysis. Meeting stakeholders and identifying their user requirements, then translating these to system and functional requirements, to be flowed down to software engineers, while also creating the associated test framework so that each requirement could be tested, and the whole thing formulate a system acceptance process. Much of my time was spent using software like DOORS. Subsystem interfaces and dependancies were probably the most challenging part (software eng. can be thought of, in it's purest form, as developing a series of interfaces). As I became more senior, I became a graduate mentor, for what was now a 4 year graduate training programme, leading to CEng. I remember using the quote my mentor used above for each of my graduates, and guessed they thought exactly the same as me when I was a graduate. I've met many developers who think they're engineers, and they just hack some code and knock up a bit of documentation (slight exaggeration there). Process never enters their mind, and that's he most important part of engineering. Engineering in the UK is not really recognised as one of the professions, which is bizarre. It's fixed up with technician, or mechanic. In the US, I believe you have to be registered. I worked for some time with a German firm, and there, they are considered a proper profession. My father's best friend was a successful architect, and said that in many countries, engineers are revered more than architects. In Germany, if you are introduced to somebody as an engineer, they'll want to