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- Name: Rowy
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Tuesday, October 18, 2005
How I Began Coding
Here's the incredible story of how I began coding ~
I remember my dad coming home with this dark gray box that would flip open - a laptop. That was something quite expensive to have during that time. I was only 5 years old, and the year was 1990. He was working as a photograph-reporter for the Mauritian Sun newspaper, and the laptop belonged to his office. I don't remember much from the computer itself, but I do remember Shamush, and BASICA.
My dad taught me my first program.
Hello, What is your name? ROWAN
Hello ROWAN
Fascinating. The ability to make the computer do what I wanted it to do. A few months later, my dad brought home a few books on BASICA. I wasn't reading it - I could barely understand English. I was just copying the examples and executing them. I started by faithfully copying down the code and then ended up modifying almost every number I could find. Thousands became millions, hundreds became zeroes. I just loved it.
Windows 95 was out, and my cousin and myself were hooked up on F1GP on my uncle's PC. And on QBasic as well. My cousin Ashvin was two years older than I was, and he had learnt quite a few tricks in programming. I could write a few stuff in QBasic as well, but I couldn't go far without the QBasic Help. I was 10-11, and I started to learn about variables. I was awed to hear about the existence of Arrays, and I heard about compilation. Compiling - the ability to make your own executables. I never wrote any useful program during that time, but I learnt a few batch-file tricks from my cousin.
I eventually ended up with my own PC in 1998, and I was off writing useless programs in QBasic. I barely understood the concepts of programming, and I hadn't heard about algorithms yet.
I met Arvind during that time. We were in school together, and we became friends. He was the batch-file genius. He had devised countless ways to include programs in batch files and make everything work together. To bad ends. He was mostly up to replacing the good old win.com by funny programs.
For the last time in my programming marathon, my dad intervened. He had bought a PC-Format magazine, which contained the full version of Borland Delphi 1. I tried it out, and fell in love with it. The help was pretty bad, but I managed to get a few working examples here and there. I was now working with forms, without having the slightest idea of what an object was, nor about Windows API calls. And the best thing about it was that I could create my own executables! Perfect!
Pretty soon, Arvind got his own copy of Delphi and stopped trying to replace win.com with other things. We were off to write **real** programs.
I eventually ended up with a modem and 56k internet. That was where I started to learn about characters, boolean values, methods, and also loops.
I don't know what went through Arvind's head, but he signed me up for a programming competition. He told the teacher that I was "good". Nope, I wasn't good at all, and I still hadn't tried writing complicated algorithms. I spent some time learning the real pascal, but still failed miserably in the competition, while Arvind got himself a bronze medal.
The competition was organised by the DCDM business school, and they held a programming bootcamp for all the participants of their previous competition. That was where I got taught everything I missed in programming. The bootcamp was also the place where I met Dimple, who would become my good friend later on. She was the cutest thing I had ever seen at 16, and the gleaming gold medal she had previously won had left me speechless.
After the training camp, Arvind taught me about pointers. I couldn't really understand the purpose of it all, but I still managed to make my own linked list. After a few weeks of practise, I made my own binary tree without any help on Pascal. I was getting better at coding.
The competition was held again the next year and I came out sixth with a silver medal. The first four guys were going to be sent to the IOI which was being organised in Finland, and there was a training camp which was being organised for them at the DCDM Business school. I was one of the replacement team members, which allowed me to follow Vik Nuckchady and Sarita Hardin's programming lessons along with the other better guys.
The guy who came out first was barely as tall as myself, with his hair in all directions and a fucked up sense of humour. Dominique. That was where I met him, although we didn't really become friends at that time. Programming was becoming more and more part of my life with every passing day. I had learnt about API calls, performance and memory optimization and a whole host of programming tricks designed to mainly impress your friends.
The programming competition was held again the next year. I was 17, Arvind 19, and Dominique 18. The day before, Arvind had taught me about the 8-Queen problem, and surprisingly enough, it came out as the final question of the competition. I came out third, Dom first (as usual), and Arvind got himself a silver medal. We were trained and sent off to the IOI which was being held in South Korea.
I became friends with Dom in Korea. None of us earned anything at all, but we were still glad to have participated. I lent Dom one of my books on Delphi, and after a few months, he became the Delphi expert.
He introduced me to OOP, although I didn't really like the concept. Most of my programs were still straightforward - I would usually kick in everything in one object, never instantiating or destroying anything at all. I kept this style of coding until we found a job.
Dom called me up one day, saying that he got an interview for a job for the both of us. I was 18, and Dom 19. The interview went fine, and we were told that we would receive about 8 months of training before we began working on solid projects.
The guy who trained us was also our CTO - Cuan brown - or Q. Although I was barely awake in Q's classes, I must admit that he did raise me from the level of n00b to something of a programmer. Q's training wasn't focused only on programming; he was constantly kicking our asses to get us to write good professional code. I was still a Delphi coder during that time, but Cuan (through brutal and sadomaschistic means) made me like C#. This blog, my .NET projects, the programs that I wrote and that are currently running in background, my ASP and ASP.NET pages and even some of the porn I leeched all exist thanks to Q. He kicked my ass and made me work with ASP, forced me to work with CSS and helped me with most of my web-related work. Nowadays, most of the code that I write would bear this faint italicized trace: Q's shoe in my butt while he was exclaiming:
I remember my dad coming home with this dark gray box that would flip open - a laptop. That was something quite expensive to have during that time. I was only 5 years old, and the year was 1990. He was working as a photograph-reporter for the Mauritian Sun newspaper, and the laptop belonged to his office. I don't remember much from the computer itself, but I do remember Shamush, and BASICA.
My dad taught me my first program.
Hello, What is your name? ROWAN
Hello ROWAN
Fascinating. The ability to make the computer do what I wanted it to do. A few months later, my dad brought home a few books on BASICA. I wasn't reading it - I could barely understand English. I was just copying the examples and executing them. I started by faithfully copying down the code and then ended up modifying almost every number I could find. Thousands became millions, hundreds became zeroes. I just loved it.
Windows 95 was out, and my cousin and myself were hooked up on F1GP on my uncle's PC. And on QBasic as well. My cousin Ashvin was two years older than I was, and he had learnt quite a few tricks in programming. I could write a few stuff in QBasic as well, but I couldn't go far without the QBasic Help. I was 10-11, and I started to learn about variables. I was awed to hear about the existence of Arrays, and I heard about compilation. Compiling - the ability to make your own executables. I never wrote any useful program during that time, but I learnt a few batch-file tricks from my cousin.
I eventually ended up with my own PC in 1998, and I was off writing useless programs in QBasic. I barely understood the concepts of programming, and I hadn't heard about algorithms yet.
I met Arvind during that time. We were in school together, and we became friends. He was the batch-file genius. He had devised countless ways to include programs in batch files and make everything work together. To bad ends. He was mostly up to replacing the good old win.com by funny programs.
For the last time in my programming marathon, my dad intervened. He had bought a PC-Format magazine, which contained the full version of Borland Delphi 1. I tried it out, and fell in love with it. The help was pretty bad, but I managed to get a few working examples here and there. I was now working with forms, without having the slightest idea of what an object was, nor about Windows API calls. And the best thing about it was that I could create my own executables! Perfect!
Pretty soon, Arvind got his own copy of Delphi and stopped trying to replace win.com with other things. We were off to write **real** programs.
I eventually ended up with a modem and 56k internet. That was where I started to learn about characters, boolean values, methods, and also loops.
I don't know what went through Arvind's head, but he signed me up for a programming competition. He told the teacher that I was "good". Nope, I wasn't good at all, and I still hadn't tried writing complicated algorithms. I spent some time learning the real pascal, but still failed miserably in the competition, while Arvind got himself a bronze medal.
The competition was organised by the DCDM business school, and they held a programming bootcamp for all the participants of their previous competition. That was where I got taught everything I missed in programming. The bootcamp was also the place where I met Dimple, who would become my good friend later on. She was the cutest thing I had ever seen at 16, and the gleaming gold medal she had previously won had left me speechless.
After the training camp, Arvind taught me about pointers. I couldn't really understand the purpose of it all, but I still managed to make my own linked list. After a few weeks of practise, I made my own binary tree without any help on Pascal. I was getting better at coding.
The competition was held again the next year and I came out sixth with a silver medal. The first four guys were going to be sent to the IOI which was being organised in Finland, and there was a training camp which was being organised for them at the DCDM Business school. I was one of the replacement team members, which allowed me to follow Vik Nuckchady and Sarita Hardin's programming lessons along with the other better guys.
The guy who came out first was barely as tall as myself, with his hair in all directions and a fucked up sense of humour. Dominique. That was where I met him, although we didn't really become friends at that time. Programming was becoming more and more part of my life with every passing day. I had learnt about API calls, performance and memory optimization and a whole host of programming tricks designed to mainly impress your friends.
The programming competition was held again the next year. I was 17, Arvind 19, and Dominique 18. The day before, Arvind had taught me about the 8-Queen problem, and surprisingly enough, it came out as the final question of the competition. I came out third, Dom first (as usual), and Arvind got himself a silver medal. We were trained and sent off to the IOI which was being held in South Korea.
I became friends with Dom in Korea. None of us earned anything at all, but we were still glad to have participated. I lent Dom one of my books on Delphi, and after a few months, he became the Delphi expert.
He introduced me to OOP, although I didn't really like the concept. Most of my programs were still straightforward - I would usually kick in everything in one object, never instantiating or destroying anything at all. I kept this style of coding until we found a job.
Dom called me up one day, saying that he got an interview for a job for the both of us. I was 18, and Dom 19. The interview went fine, and we were told that we would receive about 8 months of training before we began working on solid projects.
The guy who trained us was also our CTO - Cuan brown - or Q. Although I was barely awake in Q's classes, I must admit that he did raise me from the level of n00b to something of a programmer. Q's training wasn't focused only on programming; he was constantly kicking our asses to get us to write good professional code. I was still a Delphi coder during that time, but Cuan (through brutal and sadomaschistic means) made me like C#. This blog, my .NET projects, the programs that I wrote and that are currently running in background, my ASP and ASP.NET pages and even some of the porn I leeched all exist thanks to Q. He kicked my ass and made me work with ASP, forced me to work with CSS and helped me with most of my web-related work. Nowadays, most of the code that I write would bear this faint italicized trace: Q's shoe in my butt while he was exclaiming:
"Fucking Muppets Need Fucking Training"
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