How I Got Started in Software Development

Ok, my friend Marco tagged me and I cannot escape from doing this post :D.

How old were you when you started programming? I do not remember exactly, It was Vic20 and it was early 80. I really loved basic at these times :D.

How did you get started in programming? I simply turned on Vic 20, ran some games loaded from tape (yuck……it seems strange for me that music tape could contain games :D ) and then I began to read manuals..I found that I can program the computer, not only play with it, it was so exiting that I begin to study basic. When I grew older I decided that programming is really a funny thing, so it would be beautiful to make it my primary profession…..here I am :D

What was your first language? Basic, like most people that started to play programming in the early ’80.

What was the first real program you wrote? My first real program that did some real thing was a kind of “marrying agency” I wrote while I was a student. The program was written in turbo pascal 4.0, you entered some information about you (birthdate, things you like etc), the program save these information on disk (No RDBMS, just a custom record structure) and then try to find a match with other people in database, looking for astrological affinity, interest affinity…it was a really funny thing, because the first run was done with all my school friends :D.

The first program I did for profession was during university, written in Visual Basic 6, It was a tool to manage data for some historical buildings, I need to store information, images, and produce a txt file with weird format, that has to be sent to a national central database :D.

What languages have you used since you started programming? I started with Basic, then turbo pascal, fortran and a little bit of Cobol. Last year of high school I played with prolog then shift to C/C++ and assembly language (Mainly x86 family and some specific architecture like Playstation2 and some MIPS, then Visual Basic 5.0 and 6.0, and finally.NET environment (MSIL, Visual Basic.NET, c# and a little bit of Boo). When I was at university I used VHDL to create a simulation of a vertex and pixel shader).

What was your first professional programming gig? When I was at university I begin a collaboration with an engineer that committed to our group some programs, we worked mainly on software for engineering companies.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming? Absolutely :D, I really like this work, maybe I would have choose different area, like videgames or 3d computer graphics.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be? Always strive yourself to learn something new, never stop to read articles, books, blogs, etc. Think that code you wrote yesterday could be written better tomorrow.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming? It is difficult to answer, maybe Seeing the first textured cube on playstation2, I can rotate with controller, it was really a good sensation. Another interesting thing was fotogrammetry, we worked a lot of time ago on a custom algorithm, it was really a great sensation to scan two picture and see our program that draw the wireframe of the box to the screen. Then I really love community, making presentation, and sharing knowledge with other.

Who do I tag?

mmmmmmmm I can tag Stefano Ottaviani, a friend of DotnetMarche…hey ste….it is your turn :D

alk.