In my previous post I started
talking about part of my personal history with software development, and when QBasic
got me hooked. I ended the post talking about the move to Canada. We arrived
in Canada literally a week (7 days exactly) before Grade 9 started. After getting
enrolled in school, I tried to find something to keep my mind occupied. It was
either that or contemplate what Grade 9 would be like for someone who used to live
3000 miles away in another country. And winter. Still 4 months away, but
definitely something I didn’t want to think about. Being that we moved to a
house in the country, I couldn’t just walk around town either. Mental occupation
was harder than I thought.
So what does a 14 year old boy, new to the country, living in the middle of nowhere,
do to keep himself from going crazy? Install Linux of course! I needed
something to keep my interest, as well as to keep the gears in my head moving.
If memory serves, I started out with a vanilla copy of Red Hat Linux. It was
pretty easy to install, but being new to the OS architecture, the device mapping was
a little confusing. After a couple months of studying the Linux architecture,
I started writing shell scripts, and even delved into the source code. After
testing some minor modifications to different components I started to learn the basis
for the C/C++ languages. Imagine that, a 14 year old kid understanding the basis
for C++.
While trying to keep my mind still occupied, I came across an interesting find: The
National Security Agency’s Security Enhanced
Linux Kernel. If compiled and installed wrong, you will destroy the build.
Learned that the hard way… And seeing as I couldn’t find a proper driver for
my modem anyway, I gave up on Linux and moved back to XP. Not that the internet
was all that useful anyway; I was connecting at 28.8 half the time.
Going back to the image in Part 1,
I met an interesting character in school. He turned out to be one of my best
friends, and fellow developers, Greg. We started working on some odd projects here
and there in VB, until I was tasked with building a web store. Since I had never
actually brought HTML and Dev together, I was a little nervous about what I was getting
myself into. Going with what I knew well, I started in ASP with VB code.
This was not ASP.NET. Earlier, I had said I never found VB all that
intuitive as a language. The syntax never really made sense to me. So
my friend suggested I take a look at PHP as an alternative. I liked it.
PHP had the flow of C, and the usefulness of VB. With PHP I got the store finished
and launched. The site worked great. I was 15.
Once the first spring of my existence in Canada rolled around, a couple friends and
I decided to start a band. We sucked. But seeing as one of the other members
was Greg, we had an awesome website. We had media streaming, custom modified
forums, and full site statistics. The statistics were built around the forum.
The site pulled data from recent posts, recent events, and recent user logins, and
compared the data to the media streams. We could see who was doing what.
Mind you, there was only about 50 people who loitered around the site, but the site
was a great proof of concept for what we could do.
Following the demise of the band, Greg and I were invited to a Microsoft hosted event.
It was here that I fell in love with ASP.NET. Which I will discuss in Part
3.
