The day you realized you were a programmer ...
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
It’s time for you to follow the white rabbit…
The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word.
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
Are you the one?
Todd Smith
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
patrick.stasko wrote:
Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field.
Why did you leave?
Work @ Network integrated solutions | Flickr | A practical use of the MVC pattern
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
I realised I was a programmer some time before my 10th Birthday.
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
When I found out I can write BASIC on my Sharp Scientific EL5500III calculator the day before a math related exam(s)... I am not sure if it was cheating but at that time calculators that could run BASIC was rare and instructors weren't slamming students for computer calculators.
MrPlankton
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
patrick.stasko wrote:
Im a well rounded dork now!
Welcome to the club! I was 13 years old and my new school had some BBC Micros with tape machines attached and one BIG 'puter with a 5.25' floppy drive (can't remember the manufacturer but it booted to a BASIC interpreter like most of them did then). The teacher told us, "If you buy your own disk, you can use the 'special' computer." I rushed to buy a floppy (cost me about a months worth worth of paper round money) and she showed me a few BASIC commands and loaned me a book that explained PEEk amd POKE and lots of other dangerous commands! I got the bug - and I've been infected ever since :-D I hope they never find an antidote!
Dave
BTW, in software, hope and pray is not a viable strategy. (Luc Pattyn) -
It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
When I realised I started typing words like TeleVision or MotorBike! I started with a research machines 380z and side graded to the ZX range. BBC's and Sirius didn't help, but then an AS400! I was a God. This was back in the days that computers were user hostile, a blank screen and a c:> prompt! I learnt to love and embrace the power I had! A box that did what I wanted it to do told it to do. Wandering around with a 5.25" made me feel special! Now? I am an accountant who writes a bit of VB and C# for work, maintains the web site and am the duty tech head at the office. I STILL LOVE IT!!! :)
------------------------------------ "Password Protected? Your dealing with Geeks, just turn it on, type Gandalf and you're in!" - Frankie Boyle
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
It all started innocently enough... mark sense cards in high school to write simple applications. Then 2 page flowcharts on how to change a light bulb (there are a lot of exceptions to account for!) Then, 2 years with a Commodore PET before starting college. I would stay over at a friends house and we would have progamming contents... I write code for 15 minutes, then he takes over, but we don't tell each other what the objective was... Then today, during a meeting on how to test interview candidates, I was writing the code in my mind. My boss asked what I was doing and I told her, "That is how I think." Her reply... "You're supposed to think that way! You're a progammer!" Tim
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Sounds very familiar. For me this was in the early to mid 80s and I was 11 or 12 working on that 2k RAM vic20. Or maybe this was after I had my parents spring for the $800 8K RAM upgrade that gave me all the memory I would ever need..
John
For me, when I bought that first book for my Timex Sinclair ZX81. Learned Z80 asm. I wish I still had the little chart that listed off all the opcodes. I never did anything useful on that thing other than put it in "fast mode" to fizz up some concentric shrinking rectangles on the screen. I finally started writing useful stuff for that oh so awesome c64. http://shazware.com/me/pcPast.html[^] Those were the daze :)
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For me, when I bought that first book for my Timex Sinclair ZX81. Learned Z80 asm. I wish I still had the little chart that listed off all the opcodes. I never did anything useful on that thing other than put it in "fast mode" to fizz up some concentric shrinking rectangles on the screen. I finally started writing useful stuff for that oh so awesome c64. http://shazware.com/me/pcPast.html[^] Those were the daze :)
Thanks for the link. Really good stuff. :-D
John
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
Senior year of high school, fall of 1983, first class in BASIC-Plus on a PDP-11. Soon, the teachers were asking me how to do such-and-such. :cool:
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
For me, when I spent my week of vacation up in the northern Minnesota woods coming up with ideas for a simple collision detection for my little pet 3d game, going as far as to write down pseudocode on notepads.
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
The day I had a game I had written (in 6502 assembler on the BBC Micro) published on Ceefax. Now I was a PROFESSIONAL programmer - PooperPig earned me fifty quid (From memory I got 50 and my friend got the other 50 as he submitted it to Ceefax - so it was my first experience of selling my programming skills - and being ripped off by an agent!)
Take a chill pill, Daddy-o .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
patrick.stasko wrote:
It happened today for me.
I knew it the day I first touched my friend's computer. But it was reinforced in two additional incidents to remove any doubt. When my friend got his first computer, he wanted to learn to write games,and could not learn from a book but I could. So learned basic from his book, and taught him through instruction. I knew then this was what I wanted to be. But there was always that lingering doubt -- I was still in high school at the time and still bridling at the refusal of my family to allow any persuit of art. Then the school's new computer was spitting out 0's for cumulative GPA, and the "computer teacher" (business accounting until the school ordered computers) said it was a hardware problem and needed a new computer. What I replied from hearing that (I was also an office aid, so I got to hear a lot) is not to be repeated in front of our ladies here. When his back was turned in computer class, I snuck a peek at his code, and rapidly debugged it, found where he misnamed the cummulative GPA variable -- and since basic automatically initialized and used a new variable whenever named, without warning, what he was adding was not going into what he was printing. I gave the line numbers, and the error on a sticky note on his computer and got back on my computer to do my work. :) he didn't get a new computer. That clinched it until college, I was acing computers, but struggling through a few other classes, namely math, because of school politics. I was disappointed and ready to join the army or police or any other job that didn't require a college education. I was brooding in the stacks of the library when I heard a guy complaining to himself about an error, and I heard the typing on a keyboard. He had brought his macintosh to the library. He was writing a program in hypercard. I was intrigued, he was egotistical and glad to show off his skill. I had never seen hypercard, but in the process of him showing me his program and how it worked, I found his error and pointed it out to him. In the same moment I learned the language I also read enough to debug his program. I was a born programmer, and I realized it. So I chose another school in computer programming, out of state and away from half my problems and all my family. :) This is what I have been doing ever since.
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the c
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
When I thought that BASIC was too slow on my Vic 20 to scroll the screen so I wrote a routine in 6502 & called it from a game I wrote in BASIC. Then I wandered away from programming for 20 years, having only just recently returned to discover .NET. I guess the 3-1/2k of RAM in the Super Expander won't cut it nowadays but back then I wrote a game in BASIC that integrated 9 different games & screens into 1... in 6-1/2k of RAM.
www.CADbloke.com The Broadcast Systems Documentation SYSTEM "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" -Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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Are you the one?
Todd Smith
no but he did write a lady in red simulation....
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It happened today for me. I was digging through lines of code in C# VS2008 when my mind started debugging what I was working on. After a few hundred lines of code later it came down to one debugging error! I saw the objects within my C# app coming together in a visio flow chart in my mind. I took a second and it dawned on me, I am a programmer. Yikes! Considering I come from a very heavy Cisco networking field. Im a well rounded dork now! :-D
Congratulations, Patrick, on your experience ! I, unfortunately, can only relate the story of the day that I set out on a quest "to the death" to come up with the simplest (smallest amount of code) LISP program that, given an input of two integers representing the number of rows and columns to be created, whipped up an array memory structure. A month later I had it down to four lines or so of doubly-recursive code. Damn I wish I could remember the way I posed the problem to myself, and the solution, now ! And that was the day that I realized that I "had to be" a programmer : unfortunatly, my realization did not include an inner conviction that I "was" a programmer. In the following years, at times, I thought I was a programmer, but then some humbling thing would happen, like getting a job at Adobe. At Adobe I realized I was around "real" programmers and that I was just a PostScript "idiot savant," a kind of "bearded lady side-show act." Now, fast-forwarding to the present, it seems that any time I got close to thinking I was a programmer (because other people said I was, or people paid me money for programming), I always had something happen (like reading articles here by Marc Clifton and Sacha Barber, or books by Jesse Liberty or Jon Skeet) that quickly deflated my little balloon of ego. And now I just want to write a novel, and am quite content to let programming be a state of activity rather than think about whether it an attribute of my being :) But maybe this is what happens when you get older, and I do not wish this upon you ! May you never age ! best, Bill
"The greater the social and cultural distances between people, the more magical the light that can spring from their contact." Milan Kundera in Testaments Trahis
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I remember programming BASIC in 4th grade. Yet I've still can't program the damn TV remote....
leckey wrote:
Yet I've still can't program the damn TV remote....
harmony, expensive but geekily easy.