Frank La Vigne called me out on the Software Development Meme. Michael Eaton started this one. The path to me is:
Michael Eaton >> Dan Rigsby >> Chad Campbell >> Pete Brown >> Frank La Vigne >> Kevin Hazzard
Here's my response:
How old were you when you first started programming?
I got a hand-me-down TRS-80 Model II in 1981 from a friend who had recently upgraded to a new machine. I was 16 years old then. It was like crack for me. I was instantly addicted to software development or at least the idea of it.
How did you get started in programming?
In the early days, commercial opportunities outside of the mainframe computing space were rare. At age 16, I didn't have access to a mainframe yet. Small businesses likely to use things I could invent used paper to track their accounting and they weren't likely to switch to using a computing system that didn't fully replace their accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger and payroll systems.
Although spreadsheets like VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 arrived on the scene early, they were seen initially only as helper applications for doing what-if analysis and such. And they weren't highly programmable anyway. So real programming jobs related to the first "killer application" were hard to create. As a result, those of us working on smaller, home-based computers had no real market for our ideas. So we built games and so-called bulletin boards until our age arrived.
It wasn't until I bought an AT&T PC 6300 Plus with an 80286 CPU in 1986 that I found my first real commercial opportunity writing a turn-key accounting and inventory tracking system for a chain of video stores.
What was your first language?
Zilog-80 Assembler. I was a math geek so assembly language spoke to my soul.
What was the first real program you wrote?
I had just turned 17. My Mom was working for a local hospital organizing paper-based records. The hospital had a new numbering system for patient records for which they had to apply brightly-colored sticky labels to manila folders. I wrote a program for her that determined how many of each numeric digit was required to label a range of numbers. I started with a brute force approach which was very slow and then created an algorithm with a fixed number of computations to yield the same result. The hospital bought the program from me for $50 to help them manage the disbursement of labels to all of the contractors working on the project. It was written in Color BASIC for the Tandy Radio Shack Color Computer. I ported it to GW-BASIC to run on the hospital's IBM PCs.
What languages have you used since you started programming?
Various assembly language dialects: Z80A, MC6809, Intel 80x86, DEC Alpha and Motorola PowerPC. I wrote assembler on a Perkin-Elmer mainframe but I don't remember what the CPU architecture was, to be honest. I remember it was pretty weird, more like a macro compiler than an assembler. I got my first C language compiler for the Tandy Radio Shack Color Computer although I preferred using the assembler on that machine.
I was introduced to C With Classes (which later became C++) in 1984. There was no C++ compiler for the Perkin-Elmer mainframe I was working on. So we used something called Cfront to translate the C++ text into C language which was then further compiled into a set of linkable objects. I worked in C and C++ almost exclusively from 1988 until 2002 with brief stints into Java-land.
In 2002, the bright light of C# shone upon me and I've been pretty happy since then. C# is more expressive and makes me more productive than any other language I've ever worked with. I love Python and I'm itching to use it commercially. However, finding real applications that I can't implement with C# is pretty tough. I'm not sure PowerShell is a real programming language but, if it is, it's definitely one of my favorites.
Every time I've been forced to work with JavaScript (directly or indirectly), I've felt like I needed to take a shower. If JavaScript or HTML ever becomes the right way to implement anything, I'm switching professions. Silverlight has me very excited, as you can imagine.
What was your first professional programming gig?
In my senior year as an undergraduate student, I was contracted to write an application for tracking the inventory and sales for a small chain of video stores. I built the whole thing using Symantec's Q&A product. It was a way-cool, weird product that was part word processor, part database, part reporting engine. You could do amazing things in a short time with Q&A that would take days or weeks to implement using other tools. I think it was the first RAD tool there ever was in the PC space.
If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Yes. I enjoy software development now more than ever.
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Teach part time. Whether you do it at work, in the user group community or as an adjunct faculty member at a local college (I do all 3), you'll find that you learn more, faster by preparing to teach than you could ever learn as a student. Teaching is a fantastic form of mental catharsis. Teaching also helps build your public speaking skills, which translates into greater responsibility and a higher salary as you move forward in your career. Developers who can build cogent arguments and present them to executives often go further and faster in their careers.
What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?
When I worked at Intel Corporation in the Architecture Labs, the supercomputing group parallelized one of my fractal algorithms and made it available as a 3D "game". I had written the Pascal language implementation of the Julia Set solver in college while I was working on a paper concerning the Riemann-Stieltjes Integral. The Julia Set is a particularly beautiful fractal based on the concept of a Riemann map. Working with the supercomputing group to parallelize my algorithm and see it work in real-time 3D was a heart-poundingly cool experience. You could visually "drive through" the set to infinite levels of detail, zooming, panning and scanning in real time. What took my PC days to compute, the supercomputer was performing in milliseconds, allowing you to move through the Julia Set fluidly as if flying in a flight simulator. It was a breathtaking experience for me.
Who are you calling out?
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