Sleep Overrated - Scott Cowan

JP asked me to to post how I got start in software, so if you want to know my favourite colour or whatever that'll have to be another post.

How old were you when you first started in programming?

I'm not too sure but I must have been about 8 or 9 years old. I probably would have done it earlier if I had a computer with basic on it. The one thing that was worse than having a computer that took cassette tapes was having a broken play button on the cassette deck.

What was your first programming language?

Our Neighbour had a Apple II and I would be over there playing games all the time. One day we found a book for Apple Basic and it had a cool looking game in it so I proceeded to type out all the sample code they had for it so I could play it. It never worked but I soon followed that up with an application just as complex.

10 PRINT "Something Funny in the 80s"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

For some reason the next language I learned was Motorola 86000 Assembly.

What was the first real program you wrote?

The first real program I wrote in school was a hockey pool program. It was a team project and I was doing the UI. Everyone else was doing text only apps on the mac but I managed to add menus and normal GUI stuff and the best part was if you tried adding a menuitem outside of the menu array it completely destroyed the computer. Who would have known that you'd need to reinstall your OS from a bad line of code you wrote.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

In order of apperance
Basic,Turbo Pascal,C++,Perl,Modula-2,Visual Basic,PHP,Java,ColdFusion,C#,VB.Net,Ada,Python

I also did assemble for a bunch of different platforms
Assembly for 86000,PIC 16F84,Z80,Allen Bradely PLC5, Motorola 68HC11, C/ASM on TI C67x DSP

What was your first professional programming gig?

At a company called IQLinux.com, we were making the Ebay of Services. It sounded great but we ended up suffering from Feature Creep so much that the site got way too complex. We were working out how to do dispute arbitration before we even had users. I ended up sticking around to the point where we had moved into the basement of the founders mothers house. I still work with one of my colleuges on another project.

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

Of course, if I didn't enjoy what I was doing I'd do something else. I started out in Electrical Engineering but realized that product development was way too complex and software allowed you to do new things really quickly. I guess I just want to be able to make an impact on the world around me and I didn't see that happening in hardware.

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

People skills are equally as important as technical skills. Just because someone has been in the industry for 10 years doesn't mean he's got any experience. He may just had 1 years experience 10 times. Your education doesn't stop when you graduate, thats when it begins. If your lucky your university actually taught you about software engineering, my university did not and I was in a software engineering program.

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

Working for a startup, It's very cool to start out without the years of management overhead that you get at a large company. Too much freedom can kill you but It's nice to be able to see what isn't working and be able to change it. I love being given broad requirements and coming up with the solution to achieve them. It defers a lot from consulting gigs where you show up and everything is mostly planned out and you just have to implement.

Who am I calling out?

Micheal Foord
Ben Hall
Zi Makki
Andrew Myhre