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While we wait for the competition to start we have the perfect opportunity to introduce our programmer-selfs! All Wintreans are welcome to join the discussion, regardless of if you're intending to take part in the competition or not.


My first touch to programming happened with Commodore 64, but with all honesty I probably never programmed anything longer than a few simple lines. My first proper (albeit tiny) programs saw the daylight under Windows 95 and with the aid of QBasic/QuickBASIC. Despite of growing up with some degree of familiarity to it, I never tried to master Basic. It was just something funny to play with mostly in forms of text adventures.

I entered the website building scene in 2004 and times being what they were, I learned to despise JavaScript (things like browser compatibility and light weight were big things in my circles) and that led me to adopt PHP when I eventually needed more functionality. I experimented a lot with all kinds of programs, from guest books to full blown forum. My biggest achievement was a CMS aimed for personal websites, focusing in functions for publishing poetry and a diary.

Schools introduced Java and C# to me but without any actual uses for those languages I never continued to learn/use them beyond school. And since I'm no longer studying related field I have had no reason to improve/maintain my skills for professional goals.

So all in all I'm not much of a programmer but I still have passion towards the subject.

I'm looking forward to participating in this challenge, so I thought I might as well put my own history here. It's a nice idea!

I attribute my first coding to the world editor of the game Warcraft III, which to this day I believe to be the best game editor I've ever used. Its concepts of events, conditions, actions, variables, loops and if/then/else clauses all introduced me to the basics of programming without having to write a single line of code.

Coding in the Warcraft III Editor

I also spent my pre-uni days building many a website using HTML, then HTML and CSS, and finally hand building a PHP/HTML/CSS website. It then lead onto learning to develop both WordPress and Drupal based websites which I still code today, both for fun and for work.

When I reached University, I started off with the Java course and quickly found that the skills I'd learnt from Warcraft III fit perfectly into the basic concept for programming. It was with this I aced my Java exams in the first year, getting 98% on my practical exam. The university also threw Prolog at me, and encouraged me to code in C# for my final year project, both which I can code but now rarely do.

After leaving university, I joined the company I now work for, where my skills in Java was used to great effect in the various programming languages. I learnt Objective-C when the iPhone was released, and that fast became my favourite language, given the descriptive smalltalk style syntax it offered. I still use that today.

A few years ago (just over 2.5 years), I joined NationStates, and quickly found a niche in IRC chat bots. To code them, I learnt Python, and quickly fell in love. Today, it's my favourite language to code in, as it's really easy to build complex applications with simple code. I've managed to incorporate it into some work related applications too!

So, that's my programming story in a nutshell. Hope you enjoyed the read

Well lets see...I think I first wanted to get into programming when I was like 5 because I wanted to make games...then around 8 I technically made my first game in Byond...albeit it was very...very....crappy and I didn't understand anything that I did.

A few years later I try again and also fail for a bit....then I play minecraft and attempt to make a few mods...all fail but I get into programming (although I take a break for a bit) and then I try several more times in several different languages, eventually settling on my current Language (Python 3) for being able to build a project quickly.

I've had many, many, failures and screw-ups. However I have gotten a lot better...I also have learned little of programming through my programming class (I just picked up some Visual Basic.NET which I despise....).

I suppose my first foray into programming was in a AP Computer Science class I took as a senior in high school. Ever since I was a kid I had wanted to be a meteorologist, but by this point I was getting tired of the science electives and just picked it because I wanted a break and liked computers. We didn't actually do anything 'advanced'...each week, the teacher would led us through the project in pseudocode, then we would go to the computer lab and try to code it in C. I can't say that was when I wanted to be a programmer, but when I went to college the next year it was a factor in choosing the computer science program.

Then in my first year of college I got into a small-scale MMORPG named Mystera Legends, and at some point I ended up in charge of the forum for one of the player-ran servers which I was also a staff member on, and I decided that I wanted to create a website to interface with the server and the forums in a lot of the ways this website does with NS. The problem was that I didn't know HTML, CSS, PHP, or SQL...over time I learned all these things on my own, and that's when it clicked. I really liked making something that people used and got enjoyment from, and that's when it became more of a passion for me. Although I would learn more C/C++ and VB at school, I would continue to focus more on the web languages because it was easier to get things up there so that people could use them.

Eventually I got a job where my primary role was to use SQL to pull data and to occasionally program automated processes using VB.NET, which is still my job today, and of course I continue to do web programming mostly here in Wintreath, but occassionally other projects come up too. Most recently I started delving into HTML5, though I haven't focused on it as much as I would have liked, given all the new functionality it adds to HTML...perhaps opportunities to do so will come up soon though.

And that's where I am today.

Programming history...

I was like 15 or something and I had an online boyfriend who let me write scripts and upload them to the main Mystera Legends server. That interface was purely c++.. I asked the creator of the game why it wouldn't work, and he said he was surprised it compiled.

The creator of them game said to start with python, so I made a game in python. Eventually my ability to upload scripts to Mystera Legends was upgraded from admin's girlfriend to admin in the form of the League of Gamers server (LoG), which I was an admin on for awhile. Made I think like a Mail system, I think like 3 movescripts for different monsters.. first 3 made by someone other than the creator of the game, iirc! Also made a system for making chests in dungeons and giving loot when they were opened and also spawning them in dungeons. Then I went on vacation or something and LoG died. I was an admin on many a server, people kept letting me in. Did some more ambitious stuff that fucked shit up now and then (all the time.. >.>). Not as cautious as I should have been.

Then I went to my 4th high school and they had a brochure for another high school that I could go to part time that had a Software development program. I took that on. 2 years later I graduated and did freelance web dev for a couple years .. php, .NET, Flash etc. Made some pretty bad websites.

Then I went to work for a small (<15 people) software dev shop specializing in Avionics. First developed an emulator in c++ for the processor in the SDP185 flight management system.. so that we could run those binaries in windows. Then I did a ground station simulator for the NZ-2000.. it pretended it was a air traffic control center for demo purposes. Then I was put in charge of the ADS subsystem for the Boeing 787 project. Also did a lot of issue remediation and automated test work for all that and ADA work for Boeing 777.

Celebrated my 20th birthday by moving in with my cousin and marrying the Creator of ML's wife... then I was put in charge of the Physical, Network, Transport, and Routing stacks for a new OSI compliant avionics telecommunications product. Did a lot of work for that, also developed some tools there for monitoring live ATC traffic off the air for issue reproduction reasons (Let us send someone to France to do a flight test, record the data, and reproduce the exact conditions in the lab.. ). For that I was sent to SITA (Montreal office) to oversee final qual tests on that product.

Then I did a lot of backbone work (Network, RPC, database management/transference, flight plan transference, robustness etc.) for the thrice failed KSN770 project. Happy to say that I managed to get it way further than it had ever gone (Like, it actually turned on and performed the core function of an FMS? C'mon guys).. I think they almost actually finished it this time!

Then the company had a bit of a lul.. we did a lot of independent stuff, like I worked on a diagnostic retinal imaging device.. Made a discrete hardware device you can put in your aircraft that pairs with the above tools to allow issue reproduction on any standards compliant aircraft.

All in all, did a lot.. Now I just hack shit, less programming involved.

Let's go back to the very beginning:

I was around 10-11 years old, and watching youtube videos. I was watching videos of pranks you can pull on other people's computers. The classics, plugging in an extra mouse in the back, changing their wallpaper to a screenshot of the desktop, simple things. But then I found a video of someone using bat-files, and that was amazing. This guy was typing text into a text-file, and that made the computer do stuff? That was cool to me. I messed around with .bat-scripting, but it didn't do anything fun for a small child like me, so I gave up.

My next encounter with programming was on a vacation, when I was 13. We brought a computer with us, but no internet access, but I was bored. Since I didn't have internet access, I had to do something else. I remembered the bat-scripting from the computer at home, but I didn't find a way to do that on a mac (Surprise surprise now in hindsight). I found Applescript, a more complete scripting language for Apple-computers. I made some small stuff, but completely forgot about it after that vacation.

After that I dabbled in Java to be able to mod minecraft, but that never stuck with me either. It was a bit above my head at that point, without any former knowledge of coding.

Now I'm in school and doing programming there, mainly in C#.