Software Development MEME

Yep , I got Tagged . And by none other than Pablo Castro !!.
Now that I’ve finished gloating , let me propagate the Meme.

How old were you when you started programming?
      I was 15 when I first got my hands on a PC in my school’s computer lab.
      and then BASIC happened and I realized that the machine in front of me is filled with immense potential 
      and that simple written words could bring life in an inanimate object .
 
How did you get started in programming?
   In School , I had 2 distinct career paths in mind , be a writer and write literary master pieces ( am working on that one )
   or make a living trying to decipher the beauty of the machine I had just gotten acquainted with .
   I chose to program as words themselves might move people , they don’t enable people to go home early to  their              families or enable a farmer to check the market price of his vegetables before he/she cuts a deal .

What was your first language?   
   BASIC , the language is everything the name says it is .
 
What was the first real program you wrote?
   While in college, I picked up a job to write software for a telecommunications company.
   We wrote software that would help the telco company track the calls that were connected by an operator
   and also provide triggers for any call that was made from a number which was being tracked.
   Data regarding the calls was dumped onto a network share in a proprietary format and the software
   we wrote would pick up the data and fire the appropriate triggers.

What languages have you used since you started programming?
    C,C++, C#,F#, Visual Basic, Java , Ruby , Python ( I don’t know if JavaScript counts , but I’ll include it anyway ).

What was your first professional programming gig?
  Right out of college, I got hired by Perot Systems to work on then cutting edge “Sharepoint Portal Server”.
  I worked on Sharepoint web parts and a lot of work with the SharePoint web services.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
   Absolutely yes !

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?  
   A couple of things ,  Nobody knows everything , don’t be afraid to admit that you don’t know something.
   Nobody works alone , if you need help with anything , don’t

What's the most fun you've ever had ... programming?
 Other than several Mountain Dew Fueled coding jaunts, there have been 
a few really memorable moments of programming. Back in Perot, we had something called
a Technical Induction Program ( TIP )  for people fresh out of college who joined the company.
Everyone had to go through  a 2 Month long program ending with them building something they wanted to build
and me and a couple of other guys helping them achieve this . It was a month of fun with
me reliving what it means for someone to jump out of college and land head first on a career as a Developer
building real stuff. We used something called RemoteScripting to submit Form information without refreshing the
browser ( old school ajax ).
The other time is from the very recent past .I had the most enjoyable time working on the Silverlight Client Library for astoria .The testing framework we built to share code between the desktop Test suites and the Silverlight test suites was very unconventional to say the least , but hey , new technologies require new thinking .
It was a combination of making sure everything runs fine and passes and also the continuous dance of 
making sure the framework works and does what its supposed to . Did I tell you that it was built on top of  astoria ? Writing the test framework helped us understand what the users would feel like trying to write code in Silverlight. 
And that was the most fun I had !
 

Who’s Next ?
Carl Perry , Daniel ,  Shyam Pather .