Software Development Meme

Mark Blankenship posted his own personal history of software development and charged a few of us with posting the same. Here's my background:

How old were you when you started programming?
I remember my first official "programming" class was my sophomore year in high school so roughly age 15. I was officially playing around with a Commodore 64 as early as age 8 though. While that was mostly gaming, the memory and file models puzzled and intrigued me back then. My cousin and I would waste hours playing Mission Impossible on the C64 though. That tended to get in the way of any real programming back in the day, establishing a pattern of gaming over real work that plagues me still.

How did you get started in programming?
My brother is 5 years older and he was already starting to see some serious need for programmers while he was off at college. I was but a young lad in high school, focused more intently on sports, girls, and parties at the time. When I took my first real course at his advice though, I was hooked. So, brotherly encouragement coupled with a strong background in math. My father is a science teacher as well so he was always giving me a slight kick in the rear to pursue any and all topics that stoked my interest.

What was your first language?
BASIC, baby! I remember sitting next to a guy in that first course who nearly had the mental capacity to bend spoons and levitate people. He scored a 35 on his ACTs and a 1520 on his SATs, no joke. He was scary smart. I believe he later became a nuclear physicist, but I'm not totally sure. Anyway, he wrote a 5 level Zork type game in that class in the first two days we were there. That opened my eyes to the power of programming. Thanks Bill!

What was the first real program you wrote?
The first open canvas program I wrote was in a computer graphics class my junior year in high school. I built a dart board type game that allowed two people to compete to see who could get the dart closest to the center. By compete I mean that you merely alternated pressing a button to throw darts and they went to random spots on the board but it was still pretty cool.

What languages have you used since you started programming?
Probably missing some but here goes:
BASIC
Pascal
Modula-2
C
C++
Java
Smalltalk
Lisp
Fortran
SQL
HTML/Javascript
Ruby
C#
ASP.NET


What was your first professional programming gig?
I hired on as a paid intern thanks again to my bro. I was told I would be working on a C/C++/SQL based project for a retail services company. Instead I was working on an S1032 database with Fortran code literally printing off reams of green bar code snippets. If that place didn't have a ping pong table on site that rolled out every day at 5pm I would've probably gone postal. That assignment nearly made me into a history major.


If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
No question about it. If anything I would've been more driven to succeed in this profession and spent more of my free time learning and pushing my limits. I was largely a slacker through high school and college and it set me behind starting out in the real work force. While it did enable me to thoroughly dominate OSU's entire campus in NHL 93 on the sega genesis, it also nearly caused me to drop out, become disowned, and live life in a van down by the river. I was lucky to find my niche once again but I wonder what I would've accomplished if I would've truly applied myself.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Get comfortable with change and figure out the best way for you to learn. Change comes at you at all times from all directions in this field. Requirements are never set in stone, business direction can sometimes sway with the wind, and technology will certainly never be static. While Java has been around for 14 years now, the language it is today is worlds apart from what Gosling and co pushed out to us in the form of crApplets in 1994. All of the people in this field that I want to surround myself are quick learners and very adaptive. If you can roll with the punches figure out things quickly, then you'll never cease being marketable.

What's the most fun you've ever had ... programming?
I'm not sure I've ever had a moment of euphoria while writing a piece of code, but there was one time when I solved a huge showstopper of a bug that was visible at every level of our company. We had been seeing our application lock up the server completely on a random basis for about 2 weeks. After code inspection day 10 I finally stumbled upon an infinite recursive subroutine that was nested 142 levels deep in app server that was impossible to debug. Finally getting it resolved wasn't fun as much as it was like someone moving a car that had been parked on your foot.

That being said, I think I've had fun at every programming job I've ever been in. I attribute that solely to the various people that I've worked with, though. I have yet to work at a client yet where I've woken up with an utter feeling of dread. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I can rattle off a number of people from every client I've been at who I could call right now to go grab a beer. I think the problem solving is always fun and gratifying but working with people you genuinely want to be around is priceless.

Next up:

I'm throwing the guantlet down for another group of peeps to answer these questions:

Matt Marquand

Kevin Munc

Steve Harman

Jon Kruger

Steve Horn