Since I'm probably the last programmer on the web to write this post, I figured I'd finally get around to doing it.

How old were you when you started programming?

I dabbled a little bit when I was 10 or 11. My dad - a mechanical engineer - bought an IBM PC Jr. He knew a little C and Basic and I picked up on a few things. I also had some "Choose Your Own Adventure" type books where you had to write little Basic programs in order to progress in the book. For the life of me, I can't remember what they were called though. From there, I remember creating a program called "Froo" (presciently close to foo?) which was a series of ASCII art screens that told a story about an alien.

How did you get started in programming?

I started doing some HTML in college, making a website for my band, Red Earth. It was early enough that the first year I did it, I was viewing the site through a text-based browser. By the time I had graduated college with a secondary education degree, I had decided that it wasn't for me. I got a temp job doing data entry, which led to me a job doing release management. In that context, I was assisting someone who asked if I wanted to try some programming. I took to it pretty well.

What was your first language?

Basic when I was a kid, then a little VBScript/ASP when I started as a job. Perl was really where I cut my teeth though and was my first love.

What was the first real program you wrote?

Some sort of ASP website to display information entered from a VB 6 application.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Basic, VBScript, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Bash, C#, VB.NET, Ruby, PowerShell

What was your first professional programming gig?

I'd consider my first professional development gig to be when I got a few months into release management, when I started to do a lot of Perl development.

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

Yes. The major thing I would do different is that I would have gone to school for computer science. I've always felt that I've missed out by not getting formal training. There's no substitute for wanting to learn and taking it upon yourself to discover new ideas, but I would definitely have changed my major if I knew now what I know then.

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

Don't ever stop learning and trying to improve. This field moves so fast that you need to be aware of what's being discussed and what new ideas are being introduced. You don't want to be a magpie developer, but it's important to try out new things.

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

Any time that I can implement a new idea successfully and the HTML renders correctly or the test goes green, I get a kick out of it. I still get a little bit of a thrill when stuff works. It's still a little bit magic to me.

I'd also say that working with Leon was always great. It was easy to get better at programming when I was sitting across the aisle from somebody who has as much passion about development as I do and wanted to learn just as much.