How I Got Started in Software Development
Earlier in the week Nic Wise pinged me on the How I got started in software development meme, I'd been meaning to post my entry sooner but ended up getting sidetracked.
How old were you when you started programming?
Way way way back in the day my parents purchased me and my brother a Fountain Video Games unit when I was around 11-12, later we got a Commodore Vic 20 and the discovery of BASIC soon followed, later that year I won a Commodore C=16 at the opening of Smith and Smiths in Napier simply by standing in the right spot and the right time.
How did you get started in programming?
By now I was well and truly the outcast as all my friends now had C64's, still - I continued to mess with BASIC and making my own games and programs and eventually began to hit the limits of the machine, eventually we upgraded to the Plus/4 (the C64 was considered, but given we already had a wealth of games for the C16 the +4 was a better option at the time) and I started dabbling with 6502 assembler after my 3rd form computer studies teacher gave me a photocopied assembly language guide.
A few years later my friends and I all upgraded to Amigas and thats where the fun began - AMOS game creator, Devpac Macro Assembler, the DEMO scene, and the best text editor ever written: Cygnus Ed.
Rolling on a few more years and I "upgraded" to a PC-XT when I went 'tech and started learning about databases and the "real" world of computing.
What was your first language?
As mentioned above, my first language was BASIC on the Commodore Vic 20, followed by 6502 assembler.
What was the first real program you wrote?
What defines a "real" program? If I discount the various programs and databases I wrote as part of school or tech projects, the first "programs" would have been a simple games I wrote on the C16/Plus4 (simple sprite based shoot'em'up games) and the Amiga (scrolling text demos/intro's for our local warez group, and later simple database apps with Superbase).
What was your first professional programming gig?
Discounting the programs I worked on at my first job, the first commercial program "I" wrote would have been the Food Bank database system for the local community food bank; a Delphi 1 application which tracked food parcel requests and the phone number/address of the requestees - the applications main purpose was to match reused phone numbers and/or addresses for potential 'food request fraud'. The project was fun, but as a voluntary community service they could only pay in petrol and food vouchers.
What languages have you used since you started programming?
BASIC, 6502 assembler, 68000 assembler, Superbase, Turbo C, Turbo Pascal, Quick Basic 7 (woo compiled BASIC!), Visual Basic, Delphi, Python, Java, Dolphin Smalltalk, Javascript, HTML, CSS, XML, XSL.
If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Most definitely, but I would taken more of an interest in non-code areas of development such as project management, requirements gathering and people mongering.
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Experiment, and don't be afraid to break shit along the way - learning to fix things is often the best way to learn.
What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?
There's three distinct "fun" moments stuck in my memory, the first was spending time with dad and my brother typing in line after line of HEX code from magazines to get new games on the machine. I remember dad spending night after night typing in a new game for me for my birthday, only to find that the game didn't work and that the next months magazine had a "FIX" for the typo's in the previous issue (my first patch - I remember it well).
The next chapter in "fun" was back in the days of the Amiga scene, all night coding sessions messing with graphics and sound - Paula, Agnus, Denise, and The Copper - the fact that Agnus was replaced by the Fat Agnus was prophetic of a lot of 'people' in computing'.
Most recently that fun returned with the discovery Smalltalk - not so much the language itself, but the environment as a whole - the ability to change code on the fly and re-run live code opened my eyes to an entirely new way of coding. Sadly, it's now spoilt me in my day job :(
Now, let’s tag someone else:
So lets tag some folk: Richard Clark, Michael Lucas-Smith, Cedric Beust
Comments (2)
Nice post Mark! I feel for your dad typing on that game for you. That was a very nice gesture, pity it didn't work!
I see that you once used Superbase. You may be interested to know that a 32 bit cross platform successor called SIMPOL is nearly finished. See: www DOT simpol DOT com