It’s alive!

So – some of my readers know that I’ve been writing for the Bug publishing empire for quite a while. With some starts & stops – 16 years in fact.

Now – any way you look at it,16 years is quite a while and in many ways more time than I care to remember. But what’s done is done and the content is here.

When I first met the crew from Bug they were just starting out and I was sceptical. It was late ’92 and they were a bit late to the game. Most prominently, Byte had already started its Croatian edition and for many of us at the time Byte was the be-all and end-all of computer magazines. Well to make a long story short Byte has left the paper-based edition world long ago and Bug / Mreža rule the Croatian IT magazine scene.

Anyway… I agreed to try and write something a few months later and March ’93 saw my first column. Not to bore everyone with the details, it’s been an ongoing relationship with a few bumps on the road since then. After Bug it was Mreža, and here I am today still cranking out the stuff many years later.

So – we agreed to make a selection and publish this book. “Kud to ide?” in Croatian means “Where’s it headed?” in English.

Front cover: "Where's it going?"

The title comes from a favorite story of mine, when we demoed our ERP apps to a company many years ago. With all the data for an invoice on screen, it would all “dissapear” when the user hit “Enter”. “Where’s it headed?” a bewildered lady in accounting kept asking, and my colleagues would recount that many times, laughing until they cried. I always figured that lady had every right to be sceptical and suspicious. She was guarding financial data – the company’s crown jewels – and Lord knows many botched ERP and other systems in our industry have given the users full right to ask these questions that we feel are naive.

Anyway – it’s alive! 16 years in the making, this must surely be one of the longest-worked-on books in the IT industry. Yes – it’s in Croatian. What can I say – I’m a columnist in a Croatian magazine… Nevertheless, I thought it would make sense to let my blog readers know about this as well (a.k.a shameless plug – but who’s gonna plug me if not I!). It’s an overview of what’s been going on in this whirlwind industry of ours for a decade and a half. It’s been a wild ride and now, looking back, I feel I’ve had the privilege of keeping a sort of chronicle of our digital age and even getting paid for it along the way.

Hopefully some of you readers will find it interesting as well!