TrotterCashion

Paul says I’ve got to do this, and I don’t want to let him down. Giles tagged him first, so you should probably read his too.

How old were you when you started programming?

In third grade (when I was 8) I started started taking super nerd math classes with other super nerds. As part of those classes, they had us programming a turtle to draw things on the screen. Logo) was totally awesome and had me hooked on the magic of programming.

How did you get started programming?

After Logo, my dad (he was a CTO at the time) bought me Visual Studio and a few books on Visual Basic. It was lots of “Teach Yourself X in X days”, and I ran through VB, C++, and a little Delphi. Naturally, those books didn’t teach me to actually be good, though I did figure out how to make a few small games that I could play.

My dad was a CTO at an investment bank, which is the kind of place that treats a CTO like crap. I didn’t want to be the guy that got shat on, so in high school I dropped programming and started learning businessy things. I even picked my college based on the strength of its business school. Once I showed up, I realized that I didn’t like anyone at the business school, that philosophy was fun, and that math/econ could make me money. I promptly switched my major.

After college, I went to work at a job that I ended up hating, quit it, took a few months to figure out my life, and realized that I really loved programming. Thankfully I got lucky and read a blog post that tipped me to the beta book of AWDWR, which taught me a lot about real programming. I consider that the start of me becomming a real programmer, and not just some kid that can code.

What was your first language?

Logo! Drawing with turtles rocks so hard. After that it was VB, which let me push Windows around and made me a little cash.

What was the first real program you wrote?

I wrote my first useful program while working as an intern at a financial services firm. The company was using Axys (really bad website alert!) for portfolio analysis and had a tedious process for reconciling their branches with the back office. I wrote a VB program that helped them to perform these reconciliations more quickly, which I hear they still use.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Logo, VB, C, C++, Delphi, Ruby, Objective-C, Erlang, Scheme, Javascript, Java, and maybe something else. Of those, I’d feel comfortable working on a project using Ruby, Javascript, Objective-C, or Erlang. I’m skilled enough in some of the others, but have vowed to never use them again. I’ll let you guess which.

What was your first professional programming gig?

2005 at the Nathan Kline Institute for Mental Health. There was a PhD there who needed ImageJ to talk to his microscope over a serial port and to have a lot of old scripts from ObjectImage translated into ImageJ. It was a fun job that let me work at my own pace and play a lot with the art of programming.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Surround yourself with great people, and never be the smartest guy in the room. If you’re lucky enough to work at a company with some great programmers, you’ll learn a whole lot that way. If your company is full of 9-5 coders, join a local developer group or start your own. Nyc.rb and Philly On Rails totally rock, so you could always move to New York or Philly and learn from some of the best.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had programming?

Logo. I used to love making that little turtle draw all sorts of fun things on the screen. There was no real need to make the turtle do things, I was doing it just for the joy of it. I managed to recreate some of that feeling when working on spec-unit, which is really my only useful open source contribution to date. Unfortunately, it only has one release ever, and I haven’t messed with it in two years.