John Dyer

From Keyvan Nayyari and Janko to Mads Kristensen and now to me comes a challenge to tell how I got into programming...

How old were you when you started programming?

I think I was around 14 or 15.

How did you get started in programming?

My friend and I made text adventure games.

What was your first language?

It was some form of BASIC.

What was the first real program you wrote?

By "text adventure game", I really mean lame spaghetti-coded ASCII choose your own adventure "games." My friend had most of the funny ideas and I did most of the programming. He's now in a crazy band in Austin, TX called Natchet Taylor, and I work at a seminary!

What languages have you used since?

ASP, PHP, C#, ActionScript, SQL, X/HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and all the rest...

What was your first professional programming gig?

When I graduated from college, I took a job as a youth pastor. I needed extra cash, so I got a job as as ASP programmer for http://www.texags.com/. At that point, all I had really done was build a personal webpage in college (with animated flaming gifs!), so I just learned everything on the job. It was great fun. In those days, I'd write everything for IE, and then fix it for Netscape. Funny how things change.

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

Totally. There's always good work, and it really frees me up to be anywhere. I've made it through an entire masters degree since I could work whenever and wherever, and still be involved with friends and in ministry.

What is the one thing you would tell new developers?

I'll cheat and go with two:

1. Always, always, always have a signed contract with everything spelled out in detail and a 25-50% payment before writing a single line of code.
2. Release as much code as you can (to a blog or whatever). If your code is worth publishing, it means you probably did a good job, and would be something you won't hate to go back and modify later.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?

I would have to say programming online education stuff with foreign language support. I have no idea what any of it says, but it's really fun to develop stuff that is used in a home in Dallas, a tent in the deserts of Iraq, in the Packers lockerroom, and in an underground church in China - and all of it not just to make a buck, but to make a difference in the world. That's rock-star coding.

Okay, I'm passing this on to Nathan Smith, Chris Merritt, and John Saddington. Have fun guys.

I'm working on a new theme that is closer to a lot of WordPress looks out there.

Right now, I've going with a zero-image look to see what I could accomplish without using images for curves. So far it's looking pretty boxy, but the colors aren't too bad. I decided to use curvyCorners instead of images to round things out. Since this is primarly a blog about coding, not design, I think it's appropriate that the design doesn't have a lot of imagery, and that the site uses code to accomplish its look.

BlogEngine.NET makes skinning the site super easy since it's basically just a MasterPage and a CSS file. I also made a small change to the tag cloud and created an alternate version of the recent comments control so it just has the author and post title.

After 9 months experimenting with Windows Vista, I just rebuilt my machine with XP. I have a Dell Precision M65 that I bought July 2006. I installed Vista Betas and finally started using the released version in November. Here are the problems:

• Visual Studio was slow going: initially VS.NET 2005 didn't have a proper service pack, VS.NET 2003 was slow going, VS.NET 2002 had no chance.
• Winrot still seemed to set in after 6 months or so. My system was just incredibly slow to boot up and get going
• For some reason, I never got very speedy disk access. It would take My Computer about 20-30 seconds to find my HD's to partitions and my DVD drive. Also, search was slow.
• While Windows Mobile Device Center is nice, my company uses GroupWise and that wouldn't sync well with Windows Mobile. That's somewhat Novell's fault, but it works perfecly in XP.
• VMWare Player seemed to be much, much slower. Again, that might be VMWare's fault, but I'm glad it's working again in XP.
• I use an air card for always on internet. Windows Vista crashes when you try to sleep with a "dialup" connection still active. There is a hotfix that you can install manually to fix it, but its not a regular fix. I installed the hotfix and it worked for a while, but then started happening again later.

What I miss

• I love many of the nice interface tweaks, especially in the Explorer. I liked that the system tray separated system icons from program icons, the calendar allows you to see future months, etc. Overall I really liked Aero and features like the live window preview that XP can't do.
• Windows Photo Gallery is really nice, so I'm excited that Windows Live Photo Gallery will be released for XP
• Although I like the cascading start menu of XP, I prefer the integrated search. But even in Vista I used Launchy instead.

When I get a new PC next year, I'll definitely get Vista since the machine wil be made for it.

Our little Google Maps experiment was featured on a few websites this week:

• Google Maps Mania
• SonSpring Design
• Google Maps API discussion group
• Update: Church Marketing Sucks
  

This morning there is a very interesting use of the API to show the sites in London hit by terror attacks.

• London Terror attacks

I've been noticing a few friends (some in the programming world, some not) start to suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome. Some have started to move over to the DVORAK layout and I'm starting to teach myself the layout. Hopefully, by the end of the summer, I'll be speeding along on just the home row. There's a great advocacy website that just came out DVZine.org.

I do most of my work on a laptop, but I'm also considering getting one of these babies, though $79 is a lot for a keyboard. It's a keyboard with no markings (which apparently makes you type faster when the dependancy on looking at keys is removed) and teh keys under strong fingers (thumbs, index fingers) are weighted differntly that the keys under weak fingers (pinkies).

If anyone is also trying to make the switch, I'd love to hear about it.

Just got engaged last night to the most wonderful girl I know! http://www.revjon.com/gallery/

My two younger brothers and I just got back from backpacking trip through Europe (http://revjon.com/pics/europe2004.aspx).  Lots of FreeTextBox emails to go through...