Let's see I started programming when I was in 9th grade on my TI-83 calculator.
I started out making a text based version of Mega Max X2 where you just fought
the bosses in a turn based style. I programmed on the calculator because it was the only
thing I had at the moment as I did not get a computer until I was in 12th grade, yet ironically I knew more about computers than many who owned one.
Then later I programmed various physics and math calculations into my calculator
to help with homework, and a base converter to convert numbers from base 10 to
any other base from 2-26, or to convert from another base to base 10. Then I
moved on to having a still animated Mega Man X game where I made up 8 bosses
and as much of a story as I could fit in there, as the game already took up most
of the memory of the calculator.
So then after that I finally got a computer, which was about 15 years old at the
time (almost 25 by todays standards). It had Windows 3.11 (perhaps the worst
OS ever made), but it also had DOS and BASIC (which I already knew some of from
the calculator). So with only the help file I taught myself how to use that in
about 6 months or so, and was able to make a drawing program, a radar graphing
program, and a 2-Players turn-based battle RPG. I will put these up in the
Program page eventually in a new page called BASIC Programs. Though I'm not sure how many people will be able to run them as Windows has phased out DOS.
After this period I was at Tech and finally had a decent computer to work with
with Windows 98 then 2000. So while at Tech I learned at least 8 programming
languages (Scheme, Java, C, Lisp, HTML, Squeek, C#, MIPS Assembly). Most of
these were used to make programs for assignments like implements the string
library in C, or malloc, and emulating a pipelined processor. Of course I also
programed a few games as part of my career as a student for a couple of my
classes. These will be featured in the programming section under Java-Applets
and Java-Webstart, once they are made web-ready (still have some bugs to squash and such). In addition to this I worked on
various C/OpenGL graphics programs which will go up under the C++ section of
Programs.
That brings us up to the present where I have been learning C++, and am pretty
good with it though some of the features of the language still baffle me. In
conjunction with learning C++ I have been learning Cg, Nvidias cross-platform
vertex and pixel shader programming language. And the pages you see now are
written using a combination of XHTML, CSS, and Javascript, and now PHP as I have become very adept with it. Learning PHP has greatly increased the ease of editing webpages as the structure is pretty much done for me thanks to the design for the backend code.
When I started programming I used to be an Emacs guy programming everything in
Emacs and then using println's and the console to debug my programs. Then I
found Eclipse, and Visual Studio which do make programming a lot easier.
Especially eclipse, since it had so many nice features. So if you're programming
in Java and you're not using Eclipse yet I would suggest doing yourself a favor
and at least check it out. It also has integrated CVS, so it's completely
awesome for Java programming.
Also if you have a programming project and no one to do it for you feel free to email me and I'll write you up a custom solution, for a fee of course. I can't be an open source programmer forever, I need to eat too.
Copyright ©2006 Chris Wells [thetruecoolness]
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