Posted on: 8/2/2008 12:47:55 PM by Chris
After just over 3 months in Phoenix, I am returning to Michigan. It's been wonderful being out in Phoenix. The weather is great, the people are friendly (most of them anyway), and the nightlife is fantastic. However, for reasons I won't explain, I'm heading back to Michigan in a week and a half. While I'll miss Phoenix and the friends I have here, there are some big plusses to going back. I'll get to hang out with all of the friends I left behind, as well as the family. I'll get to go up north for Labor Day (anyone that talked to me around July 4th knows how pissed I was I didn't get to go up north for that weekend). Also, I think I'll have a better chance to get involved in the development community. There are things that go on in Phoenix, but it always seems like there are a lot more events and user groups in the midwest. So the question is what will I be doing back in Michigan? A friend of mine from college started a company back in Michigan and offered me a position. So I'll be working on software for police agencies like the software they run in cruisers to write tickets, a web site to pay for tickets online, stuff like that. So is that all for me in Phoenix? I doubt it. I'm leaving a couple of very good friends here so I'll be back to visit.
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Posted on: 8/1/2008 8:41:48 PM by Chris
Pretty much every blogging developer out there has recently posted a little write up of how they got started in Software Development. Not to be one to not follow along with the crowd, I've decided to do the same.
How old were you when you started programming?
I suppose I was about 13 or 14 when I wrote some simple applications on my TI calculator. I believe the language is
TI-Basic though at the time I didn't know that, I was just writing simple programs.
How did you get started in programming?
I'm pretty sure that the first time I played a video game, I knew I wanted to write software. Like many kids (I imagine) I wanted to make video games as they were the coolest thing you could do with a computer. I didn't know anything about what it would take to make software, I just knew I wanted to. Computers always held a certain fascination. I felt like you could make a computer do pretty much anything. That was pretty much all I did until I was in high school.
In high school they offered two different classes for computer programming: Computer Math and AP Computer Science. Anyone could take Computer Math but the AP CS class was only available to people in the very advanced math and science program (which I was not in). So in my junior year, I took the two computer math classes. Here I learned to program the TI calculators, Macromedia Director, and the big one, Pascal. Pascal was the first real language I learned and gave me my first real taste of programming. Mostly I made little games like word searches and stuff like that in Pascal. I took every opportunity to get extra credit and actually ended the class with 118% or something ridiculous like that. I showed such promise that the teachers actually let me take a special test to get into the AP Computer Science class. So senior year I took AP CS and started to learn C++ which I'd do all throughout college.
What was your first language?
My first language was technically TI-Basic but I don't really consider that a real language. I would say my first language was Pascal instead.
What was the first real program you wrote?
I guess that depends what you mean when you say "real program." If you're not counting anything I did in school, then the first real program I wrote was a video game I worked on for a start up while in college. If you are counting school, then I really don't know but I'm sure it was a pointless school project.
What languages have you used since you started programming?
TI-Basic, Pascal, C, C++, Java, PHP, Python, JavaScript, C#, LUA, Prolog, and a few others. Mostly though its been C++, Java, and C#.
What was your first professional programming gig?
While I was in college I worked for a start-up out of California working on a video game. The game is difficult to describe but used the Gamebryo engine. As I was in school I was working on this when I wasn't working on stuff in class. Really though I wasn't going to class and was staying up for several days at a time pounding mountain dew and smoking trying to get the game ready to show off at the Game Developers Conference. Things didn't really pan out but it was a great experience.
If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Definitely. I would have started programming earlier though.
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Don't ever stop learning. You can't assume that you're going to be able to get by in the real world just on what you learn in school. More likely you won't even use what you learn in school. Stay on top of everything that's happening, read blogs, listen to podcasts, go to conferences.
What's the most fun you've ever had ... programming?
Probably when I was working on the video game for the start-up in college. I was working without sleep for days (I maxed out on 5 days without sleep before I started going crazy and seeing things). I wasn't going to class (not that I needed to go to pass), I wasn't going out, and I wasn't sleeping but it was a blast. It was great to be working on a game and having fun.
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Posted on: 7/12/2008 1:51:13 PM by Chris
Yesterday Keith let me know that the RSS feed for my blog wasn't working correctly. Once we identified the problem (the URLs weren't getting generated correctly) I figured it should be a fairly easy fix. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. Due to the way I'm generating the RSS feed and the MVC framework, the urls I was generating seemed fine when I went to the feed directly, however, when Feedburner read them in, they were missing a subdirectory. After messing around for several hours, I wasn't getting it to work correctly in both places. In the long run I ended up just building the complete link (i.e. with http://www.chrisrisner.com) directly instead of trying to do relative paths. I was planning on writing a post about generating an RSS feed once I fixed the issue but since I couldn't do it directly I'm putting it off for the time being.
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