Story of my Life
My name is Jack. When I was 7 years old, my dad introduced me to the fascinating world of Computer Programming. He booted up his Pentium 120, which was fully decked out with a Turbo button and a digital readout, and loaded Visual Basic 5.0… which was only a few months old at the time. I was immediately hooked by the fact that I could control the computer, instead of it controlling me!
By the time I was 8, I was having a blast writing programs that imitated aspects of the Windows Operating System – imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – and I wrote various small utilities like a Calculator and Electricity Cost Estimator.
Thanks to the apparently-super-reliable-after-all media of Zip Disks, I still have all of my first programs, clearly dated from a time when Bill Clinton was the President of the USA and Windows 95 OSR2 was the newest operating system.
The next few years went by quickly, with a little too much time spent on the computer learning. However, it paid off! I graduated from High School at 16, and from a four-year University at 20. I immediately jumped into the corporate world, where I began giving weekly scripting and programming lessons to the System Administrators at a multi-billion-dollar company. That’s when I realized that, besides being very gutsy, perhaps I’m not too shabby at this “teaching” thing – everyone that attended my lectures said I’m a pretty good teacher.
Yes, I also imitated Quick Basic – another common programming language at the time – poorly.
My end goal is to replicate the experience I had learning programming as a 7-year-old. At that stage in life, everything is “magic”, and at no point did I think of programming as “a difficult obstacle that I’ll never be able to figure out”. I will try to copy this experience on this site, and explain things in a way that, at least in the beginning, a 7-year-old could understand.
Thanks for reading!
