What Makes us Want to Program? Part 2

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.