How old were you when you started programming?

I started programming when I was 12 years old. My father had many programing books and I started reading them and doing all the exercises. This was all on a very slow x286 computer running DOS with a very colorful 4 color monitor.

How did you get started in programming?

As stated above I started learning from books my father had at a young age. All of the programs I made at this time were all written in BASIC. I don’t remember any of the books or programs I've made at this age except one.

More BASIC Computer Games
Edited by David H. Ahl, published 1979

An archive of this book can be found here http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/

What was your first language?

My first language was BASIC.

What was the first real program you wrote?

I cant consider any programs I made from programming books, any additions I made to them or the AOL Progs I made when I was in High School a real program. I cant consider any program I made in college a “Real"” program either.

Im going to have to say its the T2D Animation Datablock Editor I made for the Torque Game Builder Pro 2D from GarageGames.

It was a tool that took an image map and let you drag and drop it in the story board to create an animation for use in the game engine.

I used to have a movie of this in action but lost it to a hard drive crash and have long since deleted backups of my old web site.

After getting a job at Web Solutions I did not have the time to continue work on this editor and donated the code and rights to Garage Games.

They have integrated it into their game engine and improved upon greatly resulting in this.\

What languages have you used since you started programming?

I have used Actionscript, ASP, Assembly, Basic, C, C++, C#, Java, Javascript, PERL,  PHP, Visual Basic, VB.Net and a few more i cant even think of right now.

What was your first professional programming gig?

I’m still employed at my first gig. I started working at Web Solutions in Sept of 05.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Oh Yes! I may have done things differently though.

I’ve always wanted to do game development and put a lot of time into that. I found that doing Web and Application programming was more satisfying for me so I may have put more time into learning that even though the end results are not as fun.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be? 

"A scientist builds in order to learn;
an engineer learns in order to build."
-Fred Brooks

I would tell them that they should be careful on what they study in college. Many students who want to get into computer programming take many useless Computer Science courses.

If your goal is to build applications take as many Computer Engineering classes as you can.

Instead of going on about this. This article can explain it much better than I could.

Software Engineering is Not Computer Science

What's the most fun you've ever had ... programming?

Oh God, now this is the part where most people would not understand unless they are a code geek like me. I always have fun programming, well… unless I have to maintain software that was written horribly or that was written in an obsolete language.