
Tavish’s excessively long programmer biography - ingve
https://github.com/tarmstrong/longcv/blob/master/bio.md
======
clifanatic
When I read things like this, I end up feeling a lot of sympathy for kids who
are trying to learn programming and "computers" nowadays. I count myself as
very fortunate that I started learning programming back in the 80's when not
much was expected out of computers, since they were so (relatively)
underpowered. I feel like I was able to learn programming concepts at a much
more leisurely pace than you're expected to learn nowadays. My first real
computer was a commodore 64 - completely self contained, no internet, no GUI,
and something you could really understand from beginning to end after a few
months of study. When I started learning more complex architectures and things
like virtual memory and pointers, I had a solid base to fall back on that I
don't think this younger generation is allowed.

~~~
yarper
At the same time, the counterpoint is of course that the 80s (and 90s for
most) really required you to read a lot of books. There wasn't really any
coding boot camps, tutorials (as they are today), pluralsight etc etc and the
chances of meeting another accomplished programmer in real life was fairly
low.

~~~
maxxxxx
Some of the books from back then were much higher quality than what you get
today. By reading Kernighan/Ritchie and Stroustrup's books and understanding
them you could get a pretty deep understanding of C/C++. Most of the material
available today seems pretty superficial in comparison. Maybe that's because
back then you had a decent shot at understanding the whole stack and now there
are just too many choices

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chatmasta
This is cool. I'm around the same age as you and share a lot of that
background. I've wanted to put something like this together for a while,
possibly in the format of a timeline on a personal blog.

It's also fun to look back at old forum accounts and blogspot posts and think
"shit, I was 12 years old when I wrote that!"

I remember being going to barnes and noble, picking up a fat "advanced PHP
programming" book, and slapping it on the counter (which was taller than I
was). The guy behind it looked at me like uhhhh is this for you?

~~~
ry_ry
My biggest programming regret is not keeping hold of the qbasic stuff I
cranked out as a nerdy kid.

I'm my head it was all so effing great (whole games with graphics drawn with
the old pen-down, forwards 10, turn 90deg turtle thing!) but I'm certain
grown-up me would get a kick out of how utterly abysmal it all was.

Then again, I'm a JS guy, so I still occasionally stumble across sites with
code i worked on a few years years ago and weep openly at it.

------
ivanhoe
Webmonkey was such a fantastic project, they really influenced my life with
those tutorials. As I've learned more about html/css/javascript it motivated
me to move forever from Delphi/C++ into the web development world. If any of
them ever happens to read this comment, a huge THANK YOU!

~~~
chatmasta
I learned all my initial programming from tutorial sites. Some other ones, if
anyone remembers: sitepoint forums, neverside, spoono, tutorial9,
phpforums.... And of course IRC channels. I had so much fun in those, always
competing with the other kids who were 12-14 years old (there was always
someone smarter than I was).

------
computerlab
I wrote up something similar a few months ago called "Everything I Have Ever
Programmed": [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/everything-i-have-ever-
progra...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/everything-i-have-ever-programmed-
patrick-steadman)

I recommend taking a bit of time to do a similar write-up, it comes easily and
you'll probably be surprised by the sheer amount of stuff you've worked on,
and might see some interesting patterns.

~~~
jcadam
I'd like to write something like this, but I'd be unemployable if any
potential employers actually read it.

Old enough to have learned to program on an Apple II while they were still in
production == too old to work here.

~~~
kirubakaran
Just a data point... I mention it all the time and it hasn't worked against me
[http://www.kirubakaran.com/about.html](http://www.kirubakaran.com/about.html)

------
tonyarkles
I'm assuming he mentioned this somewhere, but Tavish was the editor of
Architecture of Open Source Applications while was still an undergrad (if I
recall).
[http://aosabook.org/en/index.html](http://aosabook.org/en/index.html)

I worked with him as a co-editor until I had to drop out because of other
commitments. Super good dude.

------
agentgt
My biz partner and I have often thought about creating a site with mini work
history biographies to help others get further in their career (it is relevant
because we have a recruiting software company). Perhaps even hiding personal
identification of the biographer. The idea being if "I want to be a CEO how do
I get there... is there an example... what are the details that don't show up
on a linkedin profile / resume".

While you can certainly read biographies of famous individuals they are often
too long and are often fringe cases anyway (not representative of others in
the field). Also often biographies are written after or near the end of ones
career so facts maybe hazy and or contextually irrelevant by the time they are
published.

For software development this is no so difficult as most developers are
transparent and blog but for many industries this is not the case.

------
onion2k
I started programming before the author was born.

~~~
anexprogrammer
Yeah me too. If his bio is "excessively long", I dread to think how mine would
turn out or have to be titled.

~~~
pkd
You should still write it! I would like to read people's experiences
throughout the years and the things that shaped them. I am especially
intrigued by people like you who got to taste technology while it was in its
teens. I am sure a lot of other people would find value in it too.

~~~
anexprogrammer
Interesting. I'd have dismissed it as low interest, not having worked for Sun,
SGI etc or on anything world-changing. My perspective is _still_ coloured from
where I started out though.

------
musha68k
TL;DR - Programming - don't get discouraged, it's hard but possible for anyone
really - fun too sometimes! ;)

Really great write-up to share with aspiring programmers of all kinds -
debunks a lot of stories many of us tell themselves and others ;)

I hope for more honest personal stories like these (not only for
"programming"?) - always great to read about those. The internet (IRC and
forums like HN especially) has always been doing that for me and I hope it
continues to be that way for others too (anyone willing to learn really).

Edit: I've seen he knows and mentions Julia Evans - I've got the feeling that
the Montreal "scene" is on the forefront in terms of inclusivity - big fan
here - _cheers_ from the old world :)

~~~
k__
hehe, my first years of programming were filled with failure.

With 8 years I got a C64 and tried programming on it, but didn't get much
going beside some arithmetic and prints.

My next gig was mIRC with 15 years. Copied some scripts to get funny colors
going and later build some funny chat bots for games or social experiements.

Then I did a website with PHP, when I was 16 and had some C in high school
were I build 2 console games (asteroids etc.)

With 21 I did my first paid website.

As one can see, it took me many many years before I was able to make money
with my skills.

~~~
david-given
When I was 15 I wrote a game on the BBC Micro and sent it in to one of the
computer magazines of the day (this was back in 1991, and while the internet
may have existed in the UK, nobody had heard of it).

They rejected it (rightfully).

Recently I found the floppy disk, managed to find someone at work with a
KryoFlux and a 5.25" floppy drive, and, miracle of miracles, it was readable.

The next question became: what do you do with such an awful thing? The answer
is, of course, you run it in emulation on your website.

[http://cowlark.com/2015-02-03-bbc-micro](http://cowlark.com/2015-02-03-bbc-
micro)

(Don't expect much. It's in Basic.)

------
bundze
What's the point actually? I mean, I admire the diligence required to write it
all down but how should this change my outlook on programming? The general
idea is 'in order to be a good programmer, keep doing computer stuff'. Do we
need extensive biographies full of details to learn this?

~~~
toolz
The point of writing this bio probably had comparable inspiration to your own
when deciding if you should make this comment.

You wanted to make the comment and thought other people might want to read it.
Do we gain anything from your comment? No. Do we gain anything from the bio?
Maybe not. Did that stop any of us from pushing text out onto the internet?

~~~
bundze
Good point. Can't argue with that.

------
pjc50
This reminded me of this 'technical memoir' discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10412868](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10412868)

Also the book "Proudly Serving my Corporate Masters: 10 years as a Microsoft
programmer"

------
doug1001
I've been a developer for 20+ years (traditional CS/EE degree) and i think
it's more difficult to be an excellent developer now than it ever has been.
The sheer number of DSLs and the rate at which new ones appear and extant ones
become less relevant is frightening.

sure the barriers to entry to become a novice programmer are far lower
compared to 20 years ago, but the flip side of the low entry barrier is a
seductive paradigm that can so easily mislead an aspiring developer into
thinking they have reached some baseline competence, because they followed a
line-by-line tutorial to create a rails app to store and display photos in a
cool slideshow with swirling transitions set to music. Compare that learning
coding by typing at a REPL to grok the utility and time complexity of data
structures. The _immediate_ sense of accomplishment is so much higher in the
former. To someone with no prior cs training, there seems little to recommend
the difficult path.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Yeah, I have 5+ years of full time Rails programming experience. I've been
doing JavaScript full time for the last 3, and I just got turned down for a
full stack job because I didn't have enough Rails experience. People are out
of control with the platform knowledge demands.

------
yarper
I find it fascinating that most people have over a decade's experience of
tinkering with computers, writing their own little pieces of code etc before
they even enter the job market in their early twenties! Very few other
professions can expect this level of experience from people just getting
going.

------
dergachev
Hey, that's our little Drupal shop that's featured here. If any Montrealers
are reading this, we're always on the lookout for developer interns!

Here's Tavish's blog post from 2011 about it: [https://evolvingweb.ca/blog/my-
internship-at-evolving-web](https://evolvingweb.ca/blog/my-internship-at-
evolving-web)

Tavish, thanks for the kind words. We learned a lot from you too!!!

------
biot
Excessively long? Ah, millennials... perhaps you could abbreviate it down like
Fabrice Bellard's site: [http://bellard.org/](http://bellard.org/) \-- it
shouldn't take more than one line to explain things like inventing ffmpeg,
qemu, jslinux, writing a 4G LTE base station, and so on. Be sure to check out
the "Old projects" as well for greater nostalgia.

------
ybrah
Me and my boys went to CUSEC in 2013. Really good conference for upcoming
programmers

------
ontouchstart
check out this CV

[http://www.nondot.org/sabre/Resume.html](http://www.nondot.org/sabre/Resume.html)

------
personjerry
Could this be used like a resume?

~~~
jsnell
I wouldn't recommend it. It's too long and too unstructured for that purpose.
Also it's inverted such that the most important parts are at the very end. If
the CV is so long that it probably won't be read completely by everyone
involved in a hiring process, you at least want the most relevant parts in the
beginning.

It also doesn't quite work as a story, since it's mostly just a list of
events. Even biographies need a narrative arc and some kind of a hook. So it's
perhaps best to just take the README at face value on why this was written: "I
want to learn more about how people learn what they learn and examine the
sometimes serendipitous or roundabout ways that people come by their skills."

~~~
schlowmo
While I second this recommendation I would also think that it doesn't make
much sense that most HR people would prefer a "classic" resume over such a
piece.

It tells you a lot more about a person WHY and HOW he/she started several
different things then the fact THAT those things were done.

Try to imagine how this text would read in a resume like style: strip out all
the anecdotal things about how and why and just leave the "facts". To a HR
person this would read like "Oh my gosh, this person isn't knowing what to
start next." But with all the anecdotal parts it reads more like "Oh a person
which knows how to train different skill by theirself."

------
throw9183111
Why is this interesting?

~~~
OpenDrapery
"Interesting" is in the eye of the beholder. If you don't think it's
interesting, then it's not. Don't ask the internet to help you form an
opinion.

~~~
viewer5
I don't know about that, if a bunch of people are excited about something and
I'm just not seeing the 'hook', then I'd want to be clued in so I can be
excited too. Or, just be made aware "yep, that's what they were excited about,
it just doesn't do it for me", which is okay, too.

------
messel
Looking forward to the exciting conclusion, did the author just get their
first prof prog job? Does that make them good, or hireable, or are they the
same? I don't believe so.

Maybe keep it going, and it'll get really interesting around years 5, 10, or
even 20 past their first prof job.

