It’s a familiar story – I started programming when I was really young and never stopped. My dad had a Dragon 32 – not the most ancient of computers, but pretty old by anyone’s standards – and let me play on it. The idea of a toy that didn’t do anything by itself was pretty novel, and I set about learning how it all worked. As I said, a pretty typical story for a software developer.
Skip forward 20-odd years, past the Spectrum, more PCs than I care to count, and two Macs, past Basic, Pascal, Delphi, a bit of web development and a plethora of languages I poked at university, and we arrive at Java and C#. C# for preference.
My degree is in AI, but I spent several years teaching first years Java, then moved onto being a real scientist. An actual Computer Scientist, rather than a developer. Evidence-Based Software Engineering is a growing field, and will hopefully influence any and all aspects of software engineering, from agile methods to unit testing, to education. I urge you to have a look at the website, and cringe at how little evidence we actually have on which to base technical and managerial decisions.
Back on topic, I’m finally moving into the real world, as a C# developer, so you can probably expect this blog’s subject matter to become more enterprisey as time goes by.
The vast majority of problems I’ll be documenting (and posing, when the Internet fails me, as is its wont) come from personal projects, which I’ll also be posting when I think they’re ready for public consumption – basically once they’re past the point of mockery :-)
My most recent project, a lightweight media browser (I know! How innovative! Trust me, I made it because I needed it), has spawned half a dozen possible posts, so expect more on that just as soon as I’ve found a name for it.