Day zero...

Objective: just a simple notebook of some of the stuff I have read.

How Did You Get Started in Programming
Joe O’Brien
Rick DeNatale
Sarah Dutkiewicz
Michael Eaton


How old were you when you started programming?
16 or 17, on my brother's 386dx computer (I also DIY pc with 286,486,P1, P3, P4)

How did you get started in programming?
I was in Audio Visual Activities club in secondary school, the computer terminals was running this cool yellow on blue DOS batch menu. I begged the teacher to teach me, but he refused, probably due to the fact that I am a NORMAL academic stream student.

Later on I attended a basic computer class of simple dos commands and Nibbles. I would spend numerous hours playing computer games like Dune 2, Wolfenstein 3d and Doom. I got curious on how the games were created and started playing with Qbasic and DOS batch commands.

What was your first language?
Qbasic (autodidact, via reading books & help file)

What was the first real program you wrote?
a Screen 13 (320x200) random pixel 'screen saver'

What languages have you used since you started programming?
QBasic, Dos 5.0, 6.22 Batch commands, Visualbasic for Dos, QuickBasic, C, VB6, Java (since 1.2 or 1.1.5 but strangely I couldn't find the 1.1.5 information), Lingo, ColdFusion 4, Javascript 1.5, VBScript, Bash, Cisco IOS, SQL on Oracle, VBA for Access and Excel, (was learning TASM, MASM32 on TSR), Borland C++, M68k, LTSA, SQL on MS SQL, Scheme+Prolog+C#, Perl, Rockwell Arena, Matlab, Tcl/Tk with VTK, POV-Ray, (learning python and maybe smalltalk, clisp, erlang, scala later)

What was your first professional programming gig?
I just graduated recently.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
A monkey banging on the keyboard can write codes. But to write easy to understand codes, is hard work. Communicating effectively with others is also a difficult skill.

What's the most fun you've ever had ... programming?
in the zone... seeing your CodeInvaders emerging champion ...