encoded notions

(part of a series)

ProgrammingLand is a rather large place that I come back to often. In the early days, I’d ride on Q-Basic, Pascal, and GW-Basic just to feel the wind between my fingers. Like all things geared towards little kids, they make use of with flashy colors, simple concepts, and instant gratification. I’d program simple screen savers to learn how nested FOR and WHILE loops worked. I’d experiment with neat graphic visuals like antialiasing pseudorandomly generated color landscapes and lust after the effects found in things like Ryan Geiss’s plugins for Winamp.

But you can only ride these rides so many times before they bore you and your interest begins to wane. So it was with me: the amount of time I spent coding in these beginner languages resembled a square-wave as time evolved. It wasn’t until I learned of OpenGL and was exposed to Microsoft’s VisualStudio and C++ that I started riding on the big-boy rides (as this was before my Linux years and had a difficult time finding programming environments for Windows). Since I like to jump into a pool of spaghetti before learning how to swim in it since it provides for a better educational experience, my first C++ project was a 3D, two-player chess program. I don’t think I ever got that thing to work reliably, but it was a fun way to learn about computer graphics and C++ in general.

Since then, I’ve been getting on the larger rides that require seasoned tastes to enjoy, such as: Java, Python, Lisp, PHP, and of course Perl. I’ve also transitioned from needing an animated, graphical feedback from my code (screensavers and OpenGL) to enjoying the finer joys of information architectures and interfaces in regards to web browsers and design. Everytime I go for a big project, and sort out the little details—like learning SQL—as I progress: a CMS/blogging application in perl, a Perl Wiki program, a quote categorization database in PHP, and a host of other smaller tools that help me to wrangle the data on my hard drive on a daily basis.

My interest in this area doesn’t oscillate as sharply as it used to, but if I focus my efforts on building the information architectures I tend not to generate any content. It’s like being in residential construction: you build house after house, but you never live in the ones that you build.