8th Light Blog

David Chelimsky tagged me with this “chain-blog”. I’ve enjoyed reading other peoples’ stories. Here’s mine.

How old were you when you started programming.

Hard to say. I suppose I was legitimately writing code at 9 years old

How did you get started programming.

You might say I was born into programming. At a very young age, maybe 4 years old, my dad (Unclebob) would put me on his shoulders and take on a robot’s personality. He would remain motionless until I ordered a command. For example, if I said “walk” he would start walking. If I said “turn” he would turn. And in a very computer-like-fashion, he would follow my orders to the “T”. After a “walk” command, my dad would not stop walking until I issued a “stop” command. Poor programming on my behalf often led my dad, with me on his shoulders, straight into a wall. I used to laugh with delight as he’d bounce off and walk into the wall again and again until I corrected my programming error.

What was your first language?

At 9 years old my dad taught me Logo. I was drawing circles, squares, spirals, and in general making that turtle dizzy.

What was the first real program you wrote?

In high school I programmed casino games on my TI-81 during physics class. You could play Black Jack, Roulette, Bet on the Horses, play the One Armed Bandit. My friend Jim Maggio even did some pixel art for the slot machine. It was pretty sweet. All the physics students were required to have TI-81’s so my games ended up getting copied over and over. My first open source experience I suppose.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

In chronological order…

Logo, Basic, Fortran, Pascal, Forth, C, C++, Scheme, Java, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, C#, Objective-C, Smalltalk, Assembly.

Whoa! I’m impressing myself with that list. But who am I kidding? I doubt I could remember how to write HelloWorld in half those languages now.

What was your first professional programming gig?

An internship at Object Mentor. I wrote some Java Servlets to automate parts of their website.

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

Software is not a spectator sport. ie. Just watching people code won’t make you a good coder. Code as much as possible if you want to master your craft. Code at work. Code at home. Code on vacation (WARNING Your spouse may throw your computer off the balcony). Code for fun. Code to kill time. Code while you’re sleeping (I mean in your dreams).

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

The project the David Chelimsky referred to was mighty fun. But I’d have to say the most fun I’ve had with my colleagues at 8th Light, Paul Pagel, Jim Suchy, Eric Smith, and Doug Bradbury. I have never worked with a stronger team. When it comes to software, I imagine we could prevail over any challenge. Outside of software, our strengths are less impressive….

1. We started a basketball league and had a perfect record: 0-10. That’s right, we lost 10 out of 10 games.
2. We went on a ski trip together an managed to loose some family members in the mountains, during a snowstorm, at night. They lived.
3. Doing push ups every hour of every working day surely made us stronger and earned us an infamous reputation in the office.

Up Next

Paul Pagel, Jim Suchy, Eric Smith, Doug Bradbury, Matt Segvich, Unclebob, Bob Koss, Michael Feathers, Dean Wampler, Tim Ottinger, Chad Fowler, Jake Scruggs, Mike Clark

Tag! You’re it!

I’m pleased to announce the open source Limelight project: A thin client and application framework written in Ruby (JRuby).

http://limelight.8thlight.com

Back at RubyConf 2007 I prepared a 1 minute presentation, well… more of a teaser, about an application framework called LimeLight.

What is it? LimeLight is a selfish dream of mine. In a nutshell it’s a light weight ruby framework for building rich client applications. To explain further, know this. I hate building web applications. Not because they’re hard to build or anything silly like that. It’s because they’re so perverted. Writing web apps makes me feel dirty; as though I’ve sunk into a pit of waste and decay where the foundation of my work is a pool of sludge. No matter how hard I may try, the very nature of modern web apps taints my code and leaves me a sour, grumpy developer.

To understand what I mean, consider the trivial little widget on the right here. Try clicking the button and watch the light blink. Simple huh? Can you count the number of languages/technologies used in implementing this widget? And don’t forget the code required on the server side…..

I count 5. That is, in most cases this widget would require about 5 or more different languages. Let’s count. HTML of course. CSS to make it look right. JavaScript. That’s 3, but in most cases you’ve got server-side code which, if you’re lucky, involves Ruby and ERB. Think about it. You need to know 5 difference languages to build that silly widget. Yikes!

I’ll include the code below. Know that I’ve made every effort to make this code as clean and simple as possible. Still, I would need to borrow your hands and feet to count all the things I find distasteful about it. Have a close look. Ask yourself, “Couldn’t there be an easier way to do this?” I say there is.

If you’d like to learn more, I’ll be presenting on the topic at RailsConf 2008. Or you can come back this this blog site later. I’ll be sure to post any exciting progress.

<div style="border: 1px solid blue; width: 100px; height: 100px; 
               text-align: center; background-color: white; 
               float: right;">
    <div id="light" 
            style="border: 1px solid black; width: 50px; 
            height: 35px; margin: 10px 24px 10px 24px; 
            background-color: red; text-align: center; 
            padding-top: 15px;">
        Stop
    </div>
    <input id="button" type="submit" 
              value="Start" onclick="stopOrGo();"/>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        function stopOrGo() {
            var button = document.getElementById('button');
            var light = document.getElementById('light');
            if(button.value == 'Start') {
                start(button, light);
            }
            else {
                stop(button, light);
            }
        }

        function stop(button, light) {
            light.style.backgroundColor = "red";
            light.innerHTML = "Stop";
            button.value = "Start";
        }

        function start(button, light) {
            light.innerHTML = "Go!";
            button.value = "Stop";
            blink();
        }

        function blink() {
            var light = document.getElementById('light');
            if(light.innerHTML == "Go!")
            {
                if(light.style.backgroundColor == "green") {
                    light.style.backgroundColor = "lightgrey";  
                }
                else {
                    light.style.backgroundColor = "green";
                }
                setTimeout("blink()", 500);
            }
        }
    </script>
</div>