Meme du Jour

How old were you when you started programming?

8 years old, I think. My dad did Wang mainframe programming for Allis-Chalmers and dragged me into the office on weekends occasionally and sat me at a terminal with some manuals. Mostly I liked to make the noisy giant green bar printer go, as it were. However, I didn't get serious until around 9 or 10 when Santa brought my family a Commodore-64.

How did you get started in programming?

As a hobbyist pre-teen, I wrote all sorts of games and puzzles with the C-64. I even liked hacking existing commercial games. As a professional, it started for me when I was already doing Oracle DBA work, and it became obvious that somehow I was going to have to get my feet wet building things instead of just maintaining them.

What was the first real program you wrote?

It was called MamaJama. It was a Microsoft Access application that used a ODBC connections to glue an Oracle database on a Solaris machine and a RMS database on a VAX. The RMS database was very old, very cryptic and very hierarchic, tables with over ten thousand columns. The Oracle database structure was normalized, relational and useful. The VB developers of the company used the sanity of the Oracle database as the target of their coding, oblivious to existence of the VAX. Which was a good thing, because the VB developers couldn't spell VAX. The MamaJama's ran periodically to synchronize these two extremely different databases. To this day, I'm pretty sure there's no such similar software in existence, replicating a VAX's RMS database and a Solaris' Oracle database - but that could just be my own hubris assuming that.

Pretty much everything I've ever done since has been a variation in degree or another off this basic theme, connecting shit up.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

In chronological order: ROSCOE, C-64 BASIC, QBASIC, Visual Basic, Pascal, C, C++, PL/SQL, Korn Shell, VBA, Java, Python, PHP, Oracle Forms, C#, JavaScript

This excludes the multitude of product-specific 4GLs (i.e., Bendata HEAT, SalesLogix, etc.) I've been forced to muddle through because of the short term job at hand.

What was your first professional programming gig?

On the help desk at a mortgage bank, I was required on a sporadic and infrequent basis to unstick the software system we used for trouble tickets. Unsticking required the execution of a single SQL update statement. I didn't know what it did, why it was required, or even a whisper of SQL.

The reason I did the unsticking in the first place was that the staff DBA didn't want to even be bothered to do this once a month six-second task, so he installed the Oracle client on my PC, gave me the SYSTEM password, a script file containing this one SQL statement, and the three bullet-point instructions on how to execute it with SQL*Plus.

After about a year of this arrangement, the DBA was quitting for greener pastures, or whatever. His version of pass-down was to write on a piece of paper two things and hand it to me on his way out the door. He had written down our Oracle support identifier I'd need if I used the other bit, the 800 phone number to Oracle Global Support Services. I already had the SYSTEM password. What else could I possibly need?

I think it took all of a week after his absence for something to go wrong in a part of the business that had nothing whatsoever to do with the help desk duties I performed. Possession of this piece of paper implicated me as the de facto DBA and that was that. After about a decade of belly fat accumulation and a million dollars earned and burnt to a crisp, here I am.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Almost certainly not. If I wasn't such a complete pain in the ass who had to have it his way all the time as a punk kid, I would have pursued being a professor of who the hell cares and gathered as much co-ed ass as I could have until it was time to be put out on the next ice flow.

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

Quit sucking so much. Quit crying so much. So many developers have zero clue what the alternative is, never having worked a truly miserable job their whole life.