Andy Leonard called me out on the Software Development Meme, so here goes:
How old were you when you first started programming?
I was 16 and it was on a commodore 128. I still remember the GOSUB keyword :-)
How did you get started in programming?
I got a commodore for my 16th birthday, at first I was mostly playing games but after a while I wanted to see how all this worked from the inside. I learned about sprites, peeks and pokes and assembly. It was a fun time, I remember staying up till the early morning trying to figure out stuff, back then there was no Google.
What was your first language?
BASIC what else?
What was the first real program you wrote?
An online temp agency web application. This was one of these fubar dot com ideas, somebody threw some money at a company, they came to use and I started to work on this. They didn’t get additional funding and this went nowhere. As a matter of fact the first 3 websites I did never launched because of funding problems.
What languages have you used since you started programming?
C, VB, JAVA, C#, T-SQL, ColdFusion, HTML, XML, JavaScript, COBOL, CICS, JCL, SMIL
What was your first professional programming gig?
This was in Silicon Alley during the dot com boom, we had lizards sleeping on monitors, and people would bring their cats to work. We had meetings on the roof of the building. The shop didn’t open till 10 AM; I had some fun times there.
If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Yes, the fun (or curse) of programming is that it changes so rapidly, you will never be bored.
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be? Just when you think you know the product inside out and a new version comes out which takes twice as hard to master and eventually you will have to specialize. Also if you think that you will be done with learning after your first two years then you are mistaken. Once you get promoted you need to learn even more things. Another thing is that when you have a regular job and you go home you most likely won’t do anything related to the job. In programming it is not like that when you go home you have 600 unread items in you Google blog reader, you have 20 replies in twitter and FriendFeed is going crazy with the latest technews.
What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?
Putting easter eggs in code
Who are you calling out?
I am calling out the following people I know from forums, blogs or because they are friends
Alex Cuse
Denny Cherry
Jamie Thomson
Eric E
Mark Smith
Paul Nielsen
Jason Massie
