[if(is_geek)…]

It’s been a while since I have posted anything here, but I am always willing to step up in the face of a challenge from across the pond! Philip as has posted to his blog a series of questions regarding how he got started in Software Development and he has challenged me, among others, to do the same. So, here goes…

1. How old were you when you started programming?

   Honestly, I think I got a later start at programming than a lot of the programmers I know. I guess technically, the first time I made a computer bend to my will would have been in grade 10 with some HyperCard scripting. Honestly, I don’t really consider that programming though, so I’ll have to say I first started programming in grade 11 when I was 16.

2. How did you get started in programming?

   I got started by taking a class in high school. Not very exciting at all. I was already heavily into computers at that time, having been a huge computer gaming fan since my first computer – an 8086 with two double-density floppy drives and no hard drive at all. It was a great computer for playing Sierra adventure games and got me my first taste of the Wing Commander (even if I had to send away the high-density floppies for twice as many double-density ones and had to get used to swapping disks during dogfights). It was the games that got me interested in the computers and it was that interest that got me to take the classes in high school.

   I’m sort of ashamed to admit that, aside from some web stuff (the only portion thereof that could remotely qualify as “programming” was a JavaScript routine to display a random “fun thing to do with monkies” on a Geocities page), within six months of finishing the last programming class in high school I didn’t do any more programming until my thrid year of University. It was then that I took a 100-level CompSci class as an elective. I was introduced to Java. I went to maybe half of the classes. It was all very easy for me and I ended up with a 94% in the class for almost zero effort. It happened at just the right time too: my Bio classes were all boring me because I had taken more advanced versions of a lot of them in BioChem. So, I made the leap, changed my major to CompSci and haven’t looked back.

3. What was your first language?

   Ignoring the aforementioned HyperCard experience, my first real language was Pascal. Think Pascal on the Macs at school and Turbo Pascal on my computer at home.

4. What was the first real program that you wrote?

   Well, I won’t include the first “real” program I wrote specifically for a class (a D&D character sheet generator). Instead, I’ll say that the first real program I wrote was a bowling league / tournament management application, in Turbo Pascal. My parents were playing in a league at the time and one of their friends wanted a program that could track teams’ progress.

   I was even ambitious enough to make it such that you could run one season / tournament for free but if you wanted to start over it would show you a message saying that you needed to buy the program.

5. What languages have you used since you started programming?

   Let’s see. I started with Pascal in high school and then learned Java at University. I also had to deal with C,C++,Eiffel, TCL/Tk, Prolog and Lisp before finishing my degree. I’ve worked with Perl, Python, PHP, VB6, VB.NET, and C# professionally since then. Plus a whole schwack of web technologies such as JavaScript, Flex/Actionscript and the many markups that make up the web. Oh, and a bunch of scripting languages on *nix.

6. What was your first programming gig?

   My first real job that involved a significant amount of programming wasn’t a programming position at all. I was working for a web hosting company, doing all of the duties of a Systems/Network Administrator with little more than an intern’s pay. When my boss realized that I was actually more of a programmer than a systems guy, he got me working on rebuilding their online ordering system which had been shutdown for the better part of a year when they changed their domain name. The remainder of my time there was spent wrestling to learn Perl and re-implement the ordering system and online payment processing systems – interfacing with their domain provider’s horrible Perl API and Moneris’ horrible payment processing Perl API.

7. If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

   Definitely. Hell, if I knew then what I know now I could have avoided 3 years of Biology classes and I’d have two more years’ experience under my belt.

8. If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

   Trust yourself, and your code. One of the more annoying things I have seen lately with newer developers is the tendency to ask more experienced coders to look at their code / query and tell them if it will work the way they think it will. I honestly don’t remember ever being like this, as I’ve always been the type to just try things out – but it is possible I was one of those guys. Seriously, if you don’t have the confidence in your abilities to try running code without someone looking it over first, this might not be the career for you.

Taking Philip’s word for it that this is a meme (but Milhouse still is not), I’ll tag a few others I’d like to see answer these questions as well: Ralph Marchildon,James Sapara, Dustin Wasyliw. I’d add Andrew Munro to the list but he thinks he’s too good for blogging.