Category: Personal

I recently sat down with Jack Lail, a reporter for the Knoxville News Sentinel who was once a HomeSite customer. We talked for a good 90 minutes about a number of topics, but the brunt of the conversation was about Glassboard and the importance of online privacy.

If you’d like to read the interview, you can find it here.

I turned 45 this month. In many professions that’s the prime age to be – and in others it’s considered young –  but in my line of work, some people think middle-aged coders are old farts. That’s especially true when it comes to startups.

The startup culture is similar to professional sports in that it requires a fleet of fresh-out-of-college kids to trade their lives and their health for the potential of short-term glory.

“Old farts” are often excluded from that culture, not because we’re lousy coders but because we won’t put up with that shit. We have lives, we have families, we have other things that are important to us. We’re not about to sleep at our desks and trade watching our kids grow up for the promise of striking it rich. Especially when the people who really strike it rich aren’t the ones writing code.

So many developers my age have had plenty of chances to ditch coding and move into management, but we’ve stuck with coding because it’s what we love to do. We’d earn more in management, but writing software is in our blood. We wouldn’t stop doing it for anything.

And because of the years we’ve spent creating software, we’ve learned what works and what doesn’t, regardless of the language or the platform. Operating systems rise and fall, development tools come and go, but through it all, old farts know how to write solid code.

Earlier this week I wrote about "Moon Runner," a TRS-80 game I created when I was 18. That was my first piece of commercial software, but I’d written dozens of other games before that.

The first game I remember writing was "Possum Run," a bloody takeoff on Frogger which was published in a magazine called Hot CoCo when I was 16. Back then I was a long-haired metalhead, and I remember my friends being absolutely shocked to discover that I was a published geek.

During the remainder of my high school years I published a number of other games in Rainbow Magazine, including a goofy platformer inspired by Bloom County which featured a penguin trying to find wings that would enable him to fly.

Writing those games wasn’t just a hobby: it was my great escape from the boredom of school. I remember countless days staring at the clock in class, just waiting for the final bell so I could go home and continue coding. And during class I’d often be scribbling code in my notebook instead of taking notes.

Every now and then I toy with the idea of getting back into writing games, and I’ve even considered creating Android versions of my old games. But I’m more of a news and communication junkie these days, so writing games doesn’t interest me the way it used to.

Although I have to admit, it sure was fun coding that Easter egg in FeedDemon :)

Sometimes people ask me which program I enjoyed writing the most, usually expecting me to say either HomeSite or FeedDemon.

Nope.

"Moon Runner" was the software I most enjoyed creating. It was a game for the TRS-80 Color Computer that I wrote in 1986, when I was 18 years old. Back then I was hopelessly addicted to video games, so being able to write one myself was an enormous thrill.

"Moon Runner" was loosely based on the arcade game Moon Patrol which I wasted countless quarters on as a kid. It was coded entirely in 6809E assembler and took me several months to create. I still have a printout of the source code on my bookshelf, but it’s gibberish to me now.

I formed my first company ("D & N Software" – my Dad was the "D" and I was the "N") to sell the game, and had wild dreams of striking it rich. But despite receiving rave reviews in popular TRS-80 publications, "Moon Runner" was a flop. It barely earned enough to keep me stocked with peanut butter and Ramen Noodle Soup for a week.

But you know what? I didn’t care about that. I just loved the fact that I created something good enough for others to use. To this day, nothing has compared to the rush I got at age 18 when I saw "Moon Runner" reviewed alongside software written by professional software developers.

I imagine that’s similar to the thrill so many young coders feel today when they contribute to an open source project or post something that ends up on the front page of Hacker News.

That thrill is why "Moon Runner" will always be the software I most enjoyed creating.

This post on the 37signals blog struck a chord with me.

Interviewing programmers by requiring them to tackle problems on a white board is a lousy way to find successful developers, yet this practice has existed for years.

I’ve experienced it myself a few times, and each time I failed. Badly.

On one occasion I was interviewed by four separate people during a single day, all of whom expected me to answer on a white board. None of them asked any questions about previous experience. One of them hadn’t even read my résumé prior to the interview.

I’ve also been asked to tackle problems way outside my area of expertise. Perhaps the silliest was when I was expected to answer a problem which required knowledge of graphic chip architecture even though I was being interviewed for a front-end programming position that had nothing to do with graphics.

Yes, despite the fact that I’ve written several very successful programs, I wasn’t asked back for a second interview because I suck at answering irrelevant technical problems on a white board.

I agree with 37signals that the best way to gauge the potential success of a programmer is to see what they’ve already done, even if it’s just side projects they worked on in college. Interviewing via a white board is like deciding how good a musician is by asking them to write tablature instead of listening to them play.