Journey Through Time: The makings of a geek

My computer programming background has mostly been self-taught, with me learning from online references and experimenting until things worked. Because I learned on whatever system was available while growing up, my main development platforms were 1) MS-DOS/Windows machines and 2) TI graphing calculators (TI-85 and TI-89, mostly). It’s true. My first real PC apps were Pong in DOS and Tetris for Win3.1/95, assuming you don’t count Tic-Tac-Toe using QBasic. For some idea of the immensity of my dorkitude, these were all before or in the midsts of puberty…

By late middle school, I needed a graphing calculator for some of the more advanced math classes, so my dad invested in a TI-85. Knowing a few flavors of BASIC and some C/C++ by then, TI-BASIC was easy and I was trying all kinds of ambitious projects. Ultimately, I realized that the calculator community was way ahead of me, and although I was one of the more creative BASIC programmers around, that didn’t make up for the general suckage of an interpreted language on a Z-80 processor. Being determined to catch up, I learned what made the best programs better: assembly language. I proceeded to learn Z-80 assembly, and started on a massive graphical RPG…

All was going well, until I decided that the world I was building in the game was too large for the TI-85’s puny 30kb. Luckily, my sister needed a calculator by that point, so the TI-85 went to her and a beautiful TI-89 came to me. By then, I was savvy enough to immediately begin learning 68k assembly, the language on which the TI-89 ran. Thus, in my junior year of high school, I began a clone of Zelda for the NES which eventually boasted a full world map and AI for a half-dozen enemies. I never finished, but it still remained my crowning achievement on a graphing calculator.

All along, I was learning HTML so that my creations could be posted to the Internet. This penchant for web design remained with me when I started college, even when I had sworn off all the programming stuff. I also came to love Photoshop and Illustrator, so as time passed, by designs became less tacky. I also finally gave in and began using Dreamweaver to design my pages (I was a staunch supporter of Notepad before).

I only began really working with webpage design about a year ago when I started to hack bits of PBwiki to create my Encyclopedia of Vietnamese Music. At first, it was mostly crude Javascript hacks, as I was still kinda afraid of CSS. Later, as I realized the power of CSS, i began to study them both heavily. In a few months time, none of the users in the PBwiki forums knew DHTML and CSS better than I did. As I learned more, my hacks became more elegant and drastic, until the PBwiki team contacted me to do work for them. And the rest is history.

Since then, I’ve found a certain niche with my skills in webpage design. I can do AJAX with my eyes closed and CSS is my best friend. Nonetheless, I’ve realized that my marketability is limited by my inexperience with Unix-like systems and server-side scripting languages like php, perl, etc. Without a stronger understanding of the server-side coding, I’ll always have to rely on someone else to do the core work while I’m just doing the window-dressing.

All that’s changing, which I’ll talk about some more in my next post, but for now, I just felt the need to be really nostalgic. Hope you enjoyed my tracing the geeky side of growing up.

Saturday, January 27th, 2007 : Personal : No Comments

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