One of the cooler people I know, Lee Brandt, tagged me in this blog post: http://www.codebucket.org/archive/2008/08/09/how-i-got-started-programming.aspx. So here goes...
How old were you when you started programming?
That is questionable...I started building Websites in HTML on AOLPress, HotDog, and Notepad when I was 15 years old. If you don't count HTML, then I was 16. I wrote a "Hello World" Program on my TI-82 Graphing Calculator in 10th grade.
What was your first language?
HTML/Graphing Calculator Language
What was the first real program you wrote?
In the Winter of 2001 I wrote a maze program for my first programming class in college. It was pretty. You could feed it a text file and it would find the path for the maze based on a bunch of X's.
If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Yeah. I would have learned ASP a little sooner and skipped over PHP. I would have forced myself to learn more C# and ASP .Net in my senior level software engineering course. You can't really go about thinking what would have happened over what did happen. I would not be the same person.
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Join user groups. Get more involved in the community. You can learn so much more in a user group than you can in school sometimes.
What's the most fun you've ever had ... programming?
It really varies with age. When I was in high school I had the best time staying up really late and building static HTML pages and graphics in Photoshop. When I was in college I loved that maze program and for some weird reason working with linked lists. Nowadays most anything with C#, ASP .Net, and SharePoint and that is so vast...What parts I like changed based on the challenge that I am dealing with at that point in time.
One thing you have to realize is that if you are happy with what you are doing, then everything is the most fun. If you are sad with what you are doing, then it is the exact opposite.
tagged next:
JD Wade
Paul Galvin
Rob Foster