Bits & Babble

A blog in development.

A Developer’s Origin Story

October 8, 2013  

During my freshman year at college, a number of the first floor residents in my dorm gathered to watch a movie. I don’t recall the movie; it was probably Speed. I wasn’t really in the mood to watch anything, so the moment the computer in the room opened up, I jumped on and logged into my VAX account. The computer was not free for the rest of the movie.

I had been tinkering around with writing a stupid little program in whatever language was native to VAX. I think it was some hybrid of BASIC, but I can’t really remember. But that night, while Sandra Bullock drove a bus and jumped an interstate gap (probably), I finished my first “application”. I did not know how to program, nor did I know what a programming language was. I had only examined the code of other people, and hacked together some conditional logic that would tell you how much of a liar you were after you told it the length of your penis.

And I was proud of it. I showed it to a few people and we laughed. And when the joke was over, we moved on. Well, most of them moved on. I signed up for CS101 the next semester. I remember later that night thinking, “I like telling computers what to do.” There is some truth to that.

Fast-forward to somewhere in my sophmore year. I copied the idea of an existing VAX script that would check the current users in the system against a pre-defined list of users. I didn’t create the system’s first “friend list”, but I did package it into a public login script. Along with some other little things I had made (a custom clear-screen, customized prompts, etc.), I had accidentally created my first release of a software product. I called it the “Special Login”, mostly because I had given it to only a few special friends.

Eventually, people started sharing my stupid little login script. I added what could be considered rudimentary analytics to it, and found that I had a few hundred kids on campus using the thing. When I shut it down a couple years later, I think it had topped out at a little over two thousand users. I still liked telling computers what to do. But even with a small taste of fame among campus computer labs, I had failed to learn a couple of important lessons about myself.

Fast-forward a few more years. I spend one year in a development job, and five years in software testing. That did not work out well for me. I did, however, learn something about myself I failed to learn in college. I like telling computers what to do, but what I was telling computers to do was to break things.

One of the lessons I should have learned from those college moments was not that I enjoyed bossing computers around, but that I really enjoyed making things. After my foray into the realm of software testing, I have tried to focus more on creation instead of destruction.

Fast-forward a few more years. I had transitioned into a development position and started building things again. Over those next couple of years, though, the company I was working for had not shipped a single product. My realization of this came when people started asking if they had seen any of my work after I told them what I did for a living. And I had nothing to share.

I had one more lesson to learn, looking back on those early developing experiences. I was mis-understanding a key component of myself. I do want to make things, but I also want to share those things with people, and discuss how those things work.

Which brings me to this blog.

By SPENCER SOKOL
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About Spencer Sokol

Spencer co-founded Studio 27, a small web and application design and development company in Indianapolis. He has spent many years in both the development and testing side of the software industry, and generally avoids talking to people face to face.

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