The summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I lived with my grandma in Auburn, AL, and attended Auburn University for a semester, taking Chemistry 101, Calculus 101, and a computer science course that used Fortran.
My grandma was amazing. I know everyone thinks their grandma is sweet and I’m not going to convince anyone that mine was the sweetest, but I know the truth on this one.
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Windows and Visual Basic happened for me at the same time. My parents got a new computer with this Windows operating system on it. I’d never seen a graphical user interface before, so it blew my mind, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it do anything, so a week later I bought Visual Basic 1.0 at Babbage’s in the Columbus mall with my money I earned picking up turf scraps.
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Around 1986, I discovered Logo. It came on a cartridge for my PCjr, and I was very excited to find out there was more than one programming language in the world. (I know, how did I not know this? We lived in a pre-Internet world, though, and I lived in super-rural Alabama, so you found out a very selective group of facts at a time. One of my memories I love so much is when I’d go to the Sam Goody in the mall in Columbus, GA after my orthodonist appointments and buy cassettes from the bargain bin at the front of the store based solely on their cover.
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I wrote my first program on an IBM PC XT my parents had bought to run the books for their farm. It was in the BASIC programming language.
That computer came with a collection of ring binders, one of which contained a reference for BASIC.
I don’t remember what the first thing I wrote was, but it probably looked like this:
10PRINT"CLINT IS AWESOME" 20GOTO10 I went by Clint back then.
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Note: I’m an instructor at The Iron Yard. Nothing in this blog post is their opinion or endorsed by them. I doubt any of it is controversial, but it’s my thoughts and doesn’t necessarily reflect anyone else’s.
When I first considered working at a code school – that is, for the hypothetical person reading this that doesn’t know, a for-profit technical school that teaches adults how to become programmers – I had to spend some time wrapping my head around the concept.
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When working in the terminal, I find it very useful to be able to quickly search through what I’ve done before. Often there’s a command that you used that you can’t quite remember. The default shell on most computers is bash, and you can customize it to help you search your history better. Here’s the code from my bash configuration (in ~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile depending on your system):
# Append to history file instead of overwriting it.
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I’ve just hit the end of my second semester teaching at The Iron Yard here in Durham. (Well, it’s a week from the end, but I got knocked out of commission early because of this guy. Thanks to everyone on staff for being supportive and letting me snuggle my new little dude a lot.)
I still have a lot to learn, but here’s some lessons I’ve learned teaching adults – most of which came in with no programming background – to be developers.
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