Mark Summerfield

Writing & Software

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Mark spent most of his career as an independent programmer, award-winning author, and trainer. Mark is a qualified teacher and graduated with first class honours in Computer Science. Prior to starting Qtrac Ltd., he spent many years in the software industry, primarily as a programmer. He owned and ran Qtrac Ltd. for 20 years until its demise in 2026.

See the Site Map for Mark’s commercial software (no longer on sale), and his open source software, books, and short-form technical writing.

Mark’s interests include the long defunct Personal Computer World magazine and more generally the history of personal computing in the C20th, as well as programming languages.

Mark uses the Commit Mono font for coding and for terminals. For typesetting and diagrams Mark uses the Lout Typesetting System, although nowadays he sometimes uses asciidoctor or commonmark markdown.

By email Mark can be contacted as m.n.summerfield (gmail—dot com).

Mark Summerfield

A personal note about AI.

I stopped writing technical books some years ago for a variety of reasons, despite having many ideas for new technical books.

AI has now reached the point of being so useful for answering technical questions (based on all the technical books that the various AIs have effectively stolen), that it has completely destroyed any incentive I may have had left to write any more technical books.

I have written software for many decades: to earn a living, to explore ideas, to learn, and for fun.

Now I find that AI—with plenty of help—is capable of writing adequate code. I thought I could use AI to write the code that I wanted written but didn’t feel like writing myself (or that required time-consuming research that I wan’t really interested in). And this approach has worked for me and saved me lots of time. However, it has also bleached all the pleasure out of programming for its own sake, for fun, and for interest, and for me has reduced programming to something wholly utilitarian which it never was before.

As a consequence I’m now only writing new programs that I require as (rare) new needs arise, as well as maintaining existing ones.

Now that AI has destroyed writing technical books and programming as enjoyable creative activities, I’m now looking to other areas to express my creativity.

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