twister002

My 'Love' of programming is based more out of necessity, which is the mother of aggrevation.

I started out taking some LOGO and Pascal classes in elementary school on the Apple II's we had at the time. I moved on to the TI-994a and the programs in the back of Compute! magazine, I wanted to play some games and they were the best source.

Then I moved on to the C=64, started out with some basic, then learned some machine language. I wanted to do cool things with my computer, make my games run a little faster, write some small database type applications, etc...

Then there were the dark days of DOS, I uhmmmm, did lots of batch file programming. Ran a WWIV BBS and learned just enough C to be able to modify the source and customize my BBS.

I went to college, my Biochem major didn't really call for a lot of programming. Except for VBA and VB programming in Excell, LOTS of that in research.

I parlayed my VB knowledge into some positions after college. Picked up languages(Java, C++, PHP) and frameworks (JSP/servlets, ASP, VB COM) as needed and now I'm doing some C#, programming in ASP.NET.

Really as I look back, I'm more of a frustrated game programmer, writing business programs and dynamic web sites pays the bills. I often wonder where I'd be today if I had learned more early on in the ZORK and Apogee days?

So I've had absolutely no formal training in computer programming, yet most of the time when I join a new company or start a new project I end up as one of the more senior people on the project. So my advice to anyone wanting to become a programmer I think would just be "Program, a lot. Make mistakes, learn from them." I always tell someone whenever I give them a solution to their problem, usually one they never thought would work, that it just means I've screwed up in the same way twice already. Once someone told ME how to fix it, and the second time I had to try and remember what I did the first time.