I had been learning programming for awhile, on and off since grade school.
I've had computers in my life almost as long as I can remember, and always enjoyed playing with them - and trying to understand how they work.
When my family got an expensive for the time IBM Aptiva with Windows 3.1 - they decided to get me a tutor to teach me how to use windows and not break the computer.
During the first lesson - he realizes I didn't need to learn how to use windows, and he gave me a copy of Turbo Pascal on the next lesson, and started to teach me basic programming.
I learned quite a bit from him, and he also gave me a copy some stuff from SourceWare Archive Group - which had a bunch of code on it, examples, apps with source code, etc.
Really had my first 'ah-hah' spark of liking programming when I made my first tool that was actually useful for me.
Highschool
I'd play around with code on and off during high school.
The highschool I went to had an enriched program that was basically a self study/project and a presentation you had to give at the end, it also had some ok for the time programming courses that taught C++.
For the enriched program - I ended up making an /awful/ email client using MFC/Visual C++ - the teacher didn't know how to grade it, so she sent it to a developer working at the school board to get his opinion on it.
Apparently he liked it enough to request that I do a co-op at the DSBN with him.
For the first C++ class - the first year, the teacher was retiring and kind of 'everyone got an A' no matter what, but I still learned a bit.
For the second C++ class - the teacher was new, and they were only starting to teach themselves C++ a few days before teaching the class. There was a few times in the class when I'd end up taking over teaching something for them, or teaching them a bit first.
During the summer one year before graduating, decided to get a summer job (and by decided, parents probably forced) - and initially the only job I could find was working the night shift for the front desk of a hotel in Niagara Falls.
While it did have "Best View" in the name - there was no view of the falls, much to the disappointment of the busloads of travellers that would arrive in the mornings just near the end of my shift. I didn't have my career goals to be in the hospitality industry, so when a data entry job that was also normal hours, I applied and got the job.
First Programming Job
Initially this job had nothing to do with programming. This was a company that does various marketing campaigns / etc, and lots of "fill in a form and stuff it in this ballot box" type of thing for collecting people's information for various contests / prizes / whatever.
The thing is - when you had thousands of tiny bits of paper with information on it, the best way at the time - was someone had to go and type in all that information.
A recent campaign for Niagara Parks meant an abundance of these bits of paper to be entered into the system. This resulted in a short-term job posting for a few weeks / months over the summer to keep up with the extra surplus.
I type fast - I'd throw on some hard fast music, and speed through piles and piles of these little papers, before moving onto the next pile.
Eventually the pile ended - and quite a few weeks sooner than they had expected. Not sure if I had this in the contract or not, but they said:
Well, we agreed to hire you for X months, do you want to update some web pages?
I said sure.
HTML to Dev - summer before Univ
The sites I was updating at the time were all in Microsoft FrontPage - rather not relive that experience anytime soon.
Most of the changes were pretty easy to make, and did find a few ways to smooth things out when using FrontPage.
But again, I chewed through the work they had given me - and back in the "well, still a few more weeks left, do you know ASP?"
I said no - but then explained good enough at the time "It's like using Visual Basic to build web pages", and I figured why not give it a shot when I got asked to start working on programming tasks.
Dev Memories: The Hotel Reservation System is Almost Ready
One day I got a request from my boss at the time, and asked if I could build something that was "like a calendar hooked up to a database so we can store and edit things for a date"
Off I went figuring out how to build it - but in a little while I did have a little ASP application going that had a calendar, ability to add entries to dates, update them, delete them.
Later that day, or maybe week - I hear him in a phone conversation saying "Yeah, the hotel reservation system is almost ready".
No.
No.
No it was not.
I still built a cool thing, and did lots more dev work on this after - but never 100% sure if it actually got deployed.
But there is a very big gap in having 'pretty dumb calendar, that lets you do some CRUD on items for a given date' and a full scale hotel reservation system.
Dev Memories: Building a JavaScript game that was like Jeopardy, but for a beer store
This one was fun - got to make a training game for a local beer company. I think this may have had a bit of ASP driving it - as had to save the scores, and retrieve some other data.
But users would see a Jeopardy style board - pick a subject / prize amount - and need to answer correctly from a multi-choice answer to.
Clicking on boards to show the cards, keeping track of questions + multiple answers.
I think that was my first real programming job - and that was around the last year of high school for me.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
We're a place where coders share, stay up-to-date and grow their careers.
# Grade School
I had been learning programming for awhile, on and off since grade school.
I've had computers in my life almost as long as I can remember, and always enjoyed playing with them - and trying to understand how they work.
When my family got an expensive for the time IBM Aptiva with Windows 3.1 - they decided to get me a tutor to teach me how to use windows and not break the computer.
During the first lesson - he realizes I didn't need to learn how to use windows, and he gave me a copy of Turbo Pascal on the next lesson, and started to teach me basic programming.
I learned quite a bit from him, and he also gave me a copy some stuff from SourceWare Archive Group - which had a bunch of code on it, examples, apps with source code, etc.
Really had my first 'ah-hah' spark of liking programming when I made my first tool that was actually useful for me.
Highschool
I'd play around with code on and off during high school.
The highschool I went to had an enriched program that was basically a self study/project and a presentation you had to give at the end, it also had some ok for the time programming courses that taught C++.
For the enriched program - I ended up making an /awful/ email client using MFC/Visual C++ - the teacher didn't know how to grade it, so she sent it to a developer working at the school board to get his opinion on it.
Apparently he liked it enough to request that I do a co-op at the DSBN with him.
For the first C++ class - the first year, the teacher was retiring and kind of 'everyone got an A' no matter what, but I still learned a bit.
For the second C++ class - the teacher was new, and they were only starting to teach themselves C++ a few days before teaching the class. There was a few times in the class when I'd end up taking over teaching something for them, or teaching them a bit first.
During the summer one year before graduating, decided to get a summer job (and by decided, parents probably forced) - and initially the only job I could find was working the night shift for the front desk of a hotel in Niagara Falls.
While it did have "Best View" in the name - there was no view of the falls, much to the disappointment of the busloads of travellers that would arrive in the mornings just near the end of my shift. I didn't have my career goals to be in the hospitality industry, so when a data entry job that was also normal hours, I applied and got the job.
First Programming Job
Initially this job had nothing to do with programming. This was a company that does various marketing campaigns / etc, and lots of "fill in a form and stuff it in this ballot box" type of thing for collecting people's information for various contests / prizes / whatever.
The thing is - when you had thousands of tiny bits of paper with information on it, the best way at the time - was someone had to go and type in all that information.
A recent campaign for Niagara Parks meant an abundance of these bits of paper to be entered into the system. This resulted in a short-term job posting for a few weeks / months over the summer to keep up with the extra surplus.
I type fast - I'd throw on some hard fast music, and speed through piles and piles of these little papers, before moving onto the next pile.
Eventually the pile ended - and quite a few weeks sooner than they had expected. Not sure if I had this in the contract or not, but they said:
I said sure.
HTML to Dev - summer before Univ
The sites I was updating at the time were all in Microsoft FrontPage - rather not relive that experience anytime soon.
Most of the changes were pretty easy to make, and did find a few ways to smooth things out when using FrontPage.
But again, I chewed through the work they had given me - and back in the "well, still a few more weeks left, do you know ASP?"
I said no - but then explained good enough at the time "It's like using Visual Basic to build web pages", and I figured why not give it a shot when I got asked to start working on programming tasks.
Dev Memories: The Hotel Reservation System is Almost Ready
One day I got a request from my boss at the time, and asked if I could build something that was "like a calendar hooked up to a database so we can store and edit things for a date"
Off I went figuring out how to build it - but in a little while I did have a little ASP application going that had a calendar, ability to add entries to dates, update them, delete them.
Later that day, or maybe week - I hear him in a phone conversation saying "Yeah, the hotel reservation system is almost ready".
No.
No.
No it was not.
I still built a cool thing, and did lots more dev work on this after - but never 100% sure if it actually got deployed.
But there is a very big gap in having 'pretty dumb calendar, that lets you do some CRUD on items for a given date' and a full scale hotel reservation system.
Dev Memories: Building a JavaScript game that was like Jeopardy, but for a beer store
This one was fun - got to make a training game for a local beer company. I think this may have had a bit of ASP driving it - as had to save the scores, and retrieve some other data.
But users would see a Jeopardy style board - pick a subject / prize amount - and need to answer correctly from a multi-choice answer to.
Clicking on boards to show the cards, keeping track of questions + multiple answers.
I think that was my first real programming job - and that was around the last year of high school for me.