How Did You Get Started in Software Development?

After a post from little brother (well ten minutes younger, he is my twin) regarding his history in computers, I thought I would follow suit.

Like Rhys, my history started with trying to install games and getting them to either run, or run faster. My first computer exposure was an Amiga 500 at the age of 8 in primary school. We had a computer club with 4 members: A nerdy teacher, my mate, my mate’s older brother and me. We did nothing but learn to format floppy disks and play some flight simulator. We then got an Apple II gs at home which was used for basically printing out pretty thing we made in its word processor and dot matrix color printer. It always was running low on memory which at them time meant nothing to me as I thought all the memory was on the floppy disk. Then we upgraded to a PC. besides the CD drive I couldn't for the life of me figure out why this was an upgrade. Everything seemed worse than my 5+ year old Amiga. Then some gave us an illegal copy of doom and we never looked back to Amigas and apples (till recently). Yes we did end up getting a real copy of Doom by the way. Ironically stealing game software for a 13 year was a real introduction to IT. Zipping files across 8 disks, modifying AUTOEXEC.Bat and CONFIG.SYS files was the real first steps into IT. From there I took some Computer studies classes in High School. We learnt QBasic, HTML, Databases & Gate Logic. It was a really cool intro to programming (instead of word processing or IT admin).

University – Or lack of.

From high school I progressed to Uni. I started with CompSci, Physics and Calc. My grades were alright, but I really hated it. The material was kinda fun but didn’t feel like it was applicable to anything. So with some good advise I took up an Diploma in Business Programming. I know it sounds very dorky, but was leagues better than the crap I was being feed at Uni. Once I finished that full time year long course I had written an asp web site running off an Access database in my spare time. Looking back it is actually ok code. www.northsport.co.nz

Jobs – FTE to contractor

My first two jobs were post Y2K eCommerce companies. I was lucky to work with a range of talents which taught me my first lessons in corporate life. Conduit was an ASP + SQL Server 7 development shop. This is where I came to grips with (D)HTML, javascript, css, SQL Server, SPs, integration. I followed my mentor Jerome from my first job to my second at his company Neotek. Neotek was an amazing experience and cemented a wide range of skills I had started to pick up at Conduit. Neotek was an early adopter of .Net and had a fantastic product offering which constantly amazed clients with its speed (especially its pricing model).

My sporting career lead me to Perth. While there I continued to help Neotek with small stand alone projects and picked up a contract building ad hoc websites for Pretzel Logic, a local company. Pretzel was fun as most of the work was 12 week projects that I could dive into get, get done and move on to the next site. From there I moved to contracting for a Bank. This is where I am now. Working for the Bank has proved to be bitter-sweet. We were (very) early adopters of WPF, CAB & WCF which has been awesome to get dirty with new technologies. However big banks move slowly and are full of politics. Bugger.

So Rhys, there is my spiel.