
One guy's experience with programming - stephen_hazel
http://pianocheetah.com/me
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stephen_hazel
glad yall found it interesting!

side note: if anyone has any ideas about finding beta testers for my baby
(erm, pianocheetah) I'd be glad hear em. can't find beta testers to save my
life.

Overall, I'd say I'm pretty freakin lucky. Spoiled even. Thanks for the nice
replies.

~~~
Cogito
I love the idea of PianoCheetah, when I get my piano out of storage will
definitely give it a whirl.

I tried looking at the demo video to get an idea of what it does, but (almost
literally) couldn't follow along to save my life!

To get more testers etc I would 100% focus getting really good youtube videos
out there. You don't even have to make them!

When I hear about a program like this, all I really want to know immediately
is what it feels like to play with it. Do a couple of "Let's Play" style
videos, show us how much fun you have playing piano with this tool. It will
sell itself after that :)

~~~
stephen_hazel
those are some great ideas. The video I have is old as the hills. So my goals
for this week(or 2): \- a decent modern video of just practicing a song \- a
page of the "why" of pianocheetah

thanks!

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lucio
I've also had a Spectra, and after that an 88 weighted keys alesis QS8. had
the ZX Spectrum (i'm still using n as default for loop variable) and then got
the marvelous commodore 128. good old days. I was born in '71.

~~~
slight
> (i'm still using n as default for loop variable)

Haha! I'm glad I'm not the only one.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
lol you can tell who the old school Fortan programers are a sthey will use i
and j

~~~
elsurudo
I thought everyone used i and j? No seriously, my first language was VB 6 (or
5?), so I'm not remotely old-school.

~~~
hga
Well, if you go far enough in math, you'll learn the i, j, etc. convention,
which is where FORmulaTRANslation got it (unless otherwise declared, variable
names starting with i through n are integer).

And you might learn it indirectly from all the people and code that follow
this convention. In my case, it was FORTRAN first, albeit perhaps in the same
academic year 1977-8 where I was introduced to i, j, etc. in Algebra II.

~~~
mardurhack
Oh god, I've always thought that i stood for "index". And j...Well it is the
most logical name for the next index. :D

~~~
Queue52
Actually it stands for "iterator" and j and k are alphabetically next so your
assumption there is spot on. I worked at a company that had coding standards
that were put in place by a group of people who said "you can't use 1 letter
abbreviations as they don't make any sense" to which I replied with "unless
your using an iterator in a loop". Exception found.

~~~
mardurhack
Oh thanks for clarifying that!

------
digitalzombie
> Kathy turned out to be a jerk.

I saw that one coming. She left him a few time and trying to get back with her
ex.

Not good at all.

But overall, the dude seems well and surprisingly his Oracle's skill is the
one that is the most useful...

~~~
lucio
Oracle's skills are very, very useful when your problem is paying the bills.
I've done 6502 asm in the commodore 128, 80286, 386 and also ORACLE & public
sector large "enterprise-y" software on the other hand. Guess which one pays
the bills?

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tomcam
Beautiful story in so many ways. Thank you. Lots of similarities here, though
I was self taught & ended up (very, very happily) at Microsoft for a few
years. Your stories of family were enormously powerful & bittersweet. what a
ride.

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ronyeh
Nice story, Steve. It's cool to look back over a career / life and think about
what you've done and where you're going still. I think I'm about 15 yrs from
where you're at... also a fan of music, although due to coding and career and
kid, I end up not doing any music practice. :-| But I code music-related apps!
Hehe.

~~~
stephen_hazel
any music related apps I can see? :)))

good for you !

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ianremsen
As someone who happens to be 16 years old, I am incredibly jealous, and can't
help but feeling that my experiences with technology and programming in
particular are either spoon-fed or diminished in some other manner, and that
won't change in the future. Or perhaps it's just differences in perspective
and point of view. :)

~~~
stephen_hazel
I felt similar at your age when reading through Popular Electronics. I'd think
to myself "this soldering is FRUSTRATING - how can these guys KNOW so much
stuff".

It's not important to be the best. Trying to beat everyone else in the entire
world is really pretty silly when you think about it.

Follow the boyscout motto and do YOUR best. That's something achievable. Given
your circumstances, find some passions, consider how you should prioritize
them, and just keep learning about them and practicing.

Life is relatively long. You don't need to be an expert, just have a passion
for it. That passion over time will FORCE you into becoming an expert in
whatever it is you love.

But it's important to identify what it is you love early on so time can work
it's magic on ya. And keep the passions list short to concentrate the buildup.

It doesn't need to be computer programming. It is for me, of course :)

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banku_brougham
I enjoyed it Steve. Shared a lot of the same early experiences I think. Tape
drives!

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
And the comadore disk drives I used to know all of the diferent models quirks

~~~
stephen_hazel
did you put the new driver into it to speed it the heck up from slow to
reasonable? ah, good memories.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
It was more the nack of seating the floppys on the erlier drives 3000 and 4000
starting the drive running before closing the door and a sharp tap in the
right place.

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thorin
Great story. I went Vic20->Spectrum->Amiga 500->windows PC->Linux.

Given I studied electronic eng I also expected to be doing something low
level, but ended up doing enterprise oracle too for most of my career.

~~~
Razengan
Spectrum -> Commodore 64 -> DOS -> Windows 3.1 ... Windows 8 -> Mac OS X here.

I've always wanted to go back and code for the Spectrum and C64, then play
around on an Amiga, something I never got to do.

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jayvanguard
Great article. I love this style of free flowing retrospective with pictures
of old technology. The Radio Shack 160-in-one electronics kit was awesome.

~~~
stephen_hazel
yeah, I'm trying to get into robotics cuz it reminds me of my electronics
past. but my prio is pianocheetah and i'm kinda outa time. But I plan on
teachin it to my grandson if he shows interest. Next to my c64, that's
probably the most time I've spent on anything.

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BorisMelnik
very cool - I think this hit right at the right time when I am semi-nostalgic
on Thanksgiving and tend to reflect on my own past with C64s trs80s etc.

