How I Got Started in Software Development

bryan — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:12:00 +0000

Thanks to Michael Eaton for starting this meme. It’s been spreading all over the net, and I’ve really enjoyed hearing other people’s stories!

How old were you when you first started programming?

My family got a Commodore 64 computer when I was about 7 years old, and I remember being fascinated by it. I think anyone who ever had one of those computers started off with the simple BASIC programs like:10 PRINT "BRYAN IS COOL" 20 GOTO 10

How did you get started in programming?
Back in the 1980’s, books and magazines would list BASIC programs and you could type them in line by line and run them yourself. I remember getting an “Artificial Intelligence for the Commodore 64” book that started out with some simple classic computer programs, like Tic-Tac-Toe and Towers of Hanoi, and worked its way up in difficulty to Eliza. It took me forever to type in that complete Eliza program, but I remember playing with the program for hours, trying to ask it silly questions. For an impressionable little kid, that was pretty powerful stuff, to be able to type in a complete program and interact with it.

The Commodore 64 had all of these cool peripherals that you could get for it. We got the 1541 Disk Drive and started swapping games with friends. Anyone could copy games and disks, and you could even punch a hole in the side of the disk to make it double sided. I wrote a menu program to load the games from the disks. If I could go back and write that program differently, knowing what I know about programming today, I wouldn’t hardcode all the filenames.

When I was 12 years old, I borrowed a 300 baud modem from my friend Adam Foxman (who now works for Microsoft) and never gave it back. We both got involved in the BBS scene, and we did our share of leeching warez, playing Legend of the Red Dragon and Tradewars, reading the anarchist’s cookbook, and all the other fun stuff that went along with the BBS scene at the time. Basically, everything that has happened to me since 1988 has been somehow Adam’s fault.

By age 16, I had saved up enough money to buy my own computer, a brand new Intel 486 DX2/66, PC with a US Robotics Sportster 56k modem, and I decided to set up my own BBS. I ran a copy of WWIV, mostly because all the other friendly sysops in the 215 area code were running it, and we could easily get the source code (which at the time was C). I even got connected to WWIVlink so I could send mail and post messages that would get shuffled around the country. People used this pre-Internet to trade source code snippets and modifications.

Predictably, one of my favorite mods for WWIV was replacing the normal chat with that silly Eliza simulation, so that when people would hit ‘C’ to chat with the sysop, they’d be chatting up Eliza instead. The mod even put random delays, typos, and backspaces into the chat. At the time, many of the people who could call my BBS were still new to computers and didn’t catch on that they were chatting with a bot.

What was your first language?
I started with Commodore BASIC for the kids stuff, but then C was my first language for real programming.

What was the first real program you wrote?

I remember playing a prank on my dad when I was a little kid. The Commodore 64’s had an overheating issue where sometimes random exclamation marks would start to appear on the screen. Using the RND, PEEK, and POKE commands, I figured out how to clear the screen and start putting those ‘!’ symbols all over the place. My dad initially got mad, thinking he would have to return yet another Commodore 64 to Toys ‘R Us or wherever he got it, until I showed him that it was just some silly program that I wrote.

What languages have you used since you started programming?
Wow, that’s a long list.

At my first job, I mostly updated other people’s programs using C, C++, Visual Basic, and even a little FORTRAN. I started to learn Ada, because at the time I thought it would be the next big thing.

Throughout college, I actually majored in Electrical Engineering, so we had to learn other kinds of programming languages that most programmers don’t bother with -- stuff like Labview, Maple, MATLAB, SPICE, and various assembly languages. In one class, we wrote a traffic light simulator in VHDL and burned that code onto FPGA chips, then hooked it up to little red, yellow, and green LEDs on a breadboard. And I took another fun class where we used Objective C to get a little Lego robot to navigate around obstacles without falling off a table. I even won a t-shirt for that.

I also got a minor in Computer Science and, already knowing C, I was able to skip over a lot of courses. There were some classes using the more esoteric stuff like Prolog and Scheme -- those courses were fun for me. I’ve hardly used any of the stuff I learned in college, professionally.

For a while I had a job working at a company that sold a VRML and X3D toolkit built using C++ and OpenGL. The parser library used Flex and Bison, which I count as actual languages worth knowing. We also used some Tcl, Java, and JavaScript there.

I picked up all the usual web stuff along the way, learning HTML, XML, CSS, and JavaScript. I also used PHP and Perl for some side projects.

My current job involves building enterprise legal applications. The LawManager software that I use is written in Delphi, and uses VBScript as a scripting language. It also supports an older proprietary scripting language called EvLa, and I’m probably one of only a handful in the world who knows it. The job also requires me to know a lot of SQL, both Microsoft T-SQL and Oracle PL/SQL variants.

Over the last year I’ve gotten really interested in C# and ASP.NET MVC. I’m doing some stuff for fun that might turn into something useful someday.

Also, I don’t think you can exist in this business without knowing some shell scripting and regular expressions.

What was your first professional programming gig?
One of the best decisions I made was to go to Drexel University for my undergraduate degree, because they basically require everyone to go on internships. You get your degree in 5 years, but for the middle three years you alternate between 6 months of class and 6 months of paid internship. Drexel even had a required class for all freshmen to teach you how to write a resume, how to interview, how to act at work, etc.

So it was 1995, my sophomore year in college, and I went to work at my first internship for a small consulting company called Gnostech. I remember in the interview they asked me:
1. Do you ever work on programming projects on the side just for fun?
(“Yes, I’m working on an online game. I haven’t decided whether it will be set in medieval times or outer space, so I’m trying to be as generic as possible.”)
2. Do you know the difference between C and C++?
(“Not really, they look the same, but I know in C++ you can change around how the operators work.”).
I guess those answers were good enough for them, so they marked me down as a “qualified alternate” and I somehow got the job.

Gnostech was a typical small company, and they did all kinds of various computer stuff for other companies in the area -- which actually made it a fantastic place to do an internship. One day I might be installing a network, another day I’d be soldering components onto circuit boards, another day I was writing software to test the circuit boards.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Yes! In fact, I majored in Electrical and Computer Engineering in college. This involved lots of circuit design, robotics, electronics, power systems, etc. I got a minor in computer science almost as an afterthought. But if I knew then what I know now, I would have majored in Computer Science instead.

Today’s hardware is complicated stuff, and I realized about halfway through getting my degree that engineers today are pretty much limited to working on tiny pieces of big projects. Sure, there was time when a few engineers could launch a hardware company from their garage, but those days are long gone. The barrier to entry in the hardware business has increased so much that you now need to be a big international company, like Sony or Apple, to begin to think about bringing new hardware to market.

Software has gotten complex too - but creating software is still accessible to anyone with an idea, a computer, and an internet connection. The tools that we use to create software are, themselves, other pieces of software that have evolved to match the demands of this business that we’re in. We have frameworks and toolkits and libraries (often free!) to handle all those complicated details for us. Developing software still feels creative and personal. Once it’s complete, you can show it to people and say, “I did that.”

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
To be really successful in this business, you need to be more than just a programmer. You need people skills, communication, and empathy. You need creativity and curiosity -- never stop reading and learning. You need to be a critical thinker, and a problem solver. You need to get out in the world and meet people who are not programmers, and understand their needs, and build software that they can use.

What's the most fun you've ever had programming?
During the dot-com bubble I worked at a startup company called OpenWorlds, just me and a few other programmers in a small office. We were building a toolkit for using VRML and X3D, which is a kind of 3D version of the HTML that powers the world wide web. VRML never took off, for many reasons that seem obvious now, but at the time people were excited about anything involving the web or 3D graphics.

The best part of the job was traveling to conventions like SIGGRAPH to demo our software with a bunch of other startup companies. They did this thing called the Web3D RoundUP where each company had a few minutes to do a demo, and the audience, served alcohol beforehand, had noisemakers to let you know how well the demo was going. If you went over time, they’d shoot you with ping pong ball guns. There was a lot of last minute coding going on, and the demos were pretty crashy, but the whole party atmosphere at the time was loads of fun.

About Me

bryan — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 17:59:02 +0000

Hi, I'm Bryan Housel, a consultant in the New York City area specializing in Law Manager - a software platform for building enterprise legal information management systems. The software is used by many of the biggest government, corporate, and legal organizations in the world. Over the past 10 years, I have worked with many of these clients to design, develop, and maintain their Law Manager systems.

Currently, I am working with Citigroup, the New York City Law Department, and the Port Authority of NY/NJ on various projects involving their Law Manager systems. I am also involved in the Law Manager User's Group, and I maintain the group's online presence at www.lawmanager.info.

When I'm not working, I enjoy traveling, hiking, running, playing Nintendo Wii, and spending time with my wife Mary (luckily she likes all of those things too!) I also do a lot of reading. My Amazon Wish List probably says more about me than anything that I could write here.

I used to play trombone in a bunch of jazz and salsa bands, but I'm retired from that now.

I have my own word:
be·hou·sel - (bĭ-hou'zəl) -verb (used with object), -seled, -sel·ing.

to unimpress or underwhelm esp. so as to make obvious to faults or shortcomings:
e.g. Audiences were behouseled by The Phantom Menace.

Related forms:
be·hou·sel·ment, noun
be·hou·sel·ing·ly, adverb

I can be contacted at bryan@7thposition.com.

7th Position - Bryan Housel

How I Got Started in Software Development

About Me