Did You Know? My First Meme

Kalen Delaney — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:54:00 GMT

I was just tagged by Andy Leonard, and truth to tell, I don't read Andy's blog all that often because he talks about really developer oriented stuff, which is a little outside my focus area now. But I was intrigued by the concept of a techblog meme, which I'd never seen before. I'd only seen memes discussed on my daughter's food blog, but at least I knew what they were because of that. You can read hers here, here and here. And then I realized I shouldn't have been quite so curious, because he tagged me! I saw today that Denis already responded, and tagged a whole bunch of people. I thought there was supposed to some sort of limit on the number of people you could tag; otherwise all the good tagees would get tagged too quickly. :-)

Although the meme is about software development, which I don't really do, I figured I could answer most of the questions, but for some of the answers I substitute 'working with computers' for 'programming'.

How old were you when you first started programming?
I was 16 years old and a Junior in High School.
How did you get started in programming?
I took a night class at a local Community College.
What was your first language?
Fortran... and it was mostly boring programs, but the 'idea' of programming fascinated me!
What was the first real program you wrote?
Hmm, what counts as 'real'? Commercially viable? Or just one that other people wanted to use? My first was a game I wrote for the Atari 800 that helped preschoolers to memorize their phone number. (My daughter was a pre-schooler at the time.) The teacher wanted a copy, then all the other teachers, then friends of the teachers, etc, etc....
What languages have you used since you started programming?
Fortran, Basic, PDP Assembly Language, Logo, C, Pascal, Lisp, Sequel, SQL, SQL, SQL, SQL.....
(...and probably a few I've forgotten)
What was your first professional programming gig?
I've actually never had a 'programming gig'. My first paid job with computers was being a teaching assistant for Computer Science classes at UC Berkeley.
If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Too hard of a question. I absolutely love what I do, but I can see lots of other paths my life could have taken, if back when I was 16 I knew everything that I know today. :-)
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Have fun!
Who are you calling out?
Lara Rubbelke
Tibor Karaszi
Kimberley Tripp
Linchi Shea

Kalen Delaney : meme

Did You Know? My First Meme