Writing code for most of my life.. went something like this:
- BASIC on Commodore Pet .. choose your own adventure using PRINT, GOTOs and single key reads in elementary. Everything I needed to know about computers I learned in 2nd grade ;)
- Wrote many stupid algos on those sweet Commodores until my grandfather gifted me his 8088 with external 10MB HD and CGA graphics + 300baud internal modem. It was starting to show age at that point but was my main development machine until much later when most of my friends had 386s.
- Transitioned to Mac code around the end of my 8088 days. Fell in love with Hypercard for a few years thanks to a math teach by the name of Robert Kaneko. Spent ungodly amounts of time figuring out how to do sprite style animation with Hypercard buttons. Wrote a couple games during this period.
- Was given a telnet account at University of Washington for my 16th birthday. Used a mac and 14.4baud modem to telnet into a small SunOS cluster. Convinced some unwitting CS students to teach me how to use PICO and cc to write socket programs.
- Graduated from high school and worked for my uncle writing Java based screen scrapers of LOC data.
- Wandered though various jobs until meeting two incredible systems/network engineers Bryn Moslow and Mike Smith who worked for a company called Northwest Link where I went from answering support calls to writing radius billing software and CGI applications in C for FreeBSD/MySQL
- Through conversations ended up talking to a wizard programmer named John Fawcett who brought me on to write cross platform networking code at electronic arts. And taught me that all great (old?) programmers are also great jugglers.
- Met my future wife!
- Had first baby
- Went to work for content management startup writing cross platform code, 3 years of hard labor till I could take it no longer.
- Interviewed at many companies ended up going the place I least expected after receiving a last minute phone call. Now working on Xbox Live at Microsoft.
Welcome, Jacob. You might want to change your single hyphens to asterisks. See TextFormattingRules for help creating a list.
Interesting, I'm not too familiar with actual use of Wiki yet so I don't know if that was a person or an automated text processor that did that but neato. I will just be naive and pretend it was a person and say 'Thank you'! (It was a WikiGnome and having everything you do being edited by others is just all part of the WikiExperience good and bad. Welcome to wiki!)
So I'm currently working on two different games and have done some embedding of LuaLanguage which is a very nice simple language but I have an old love of the LispLanguage (Learned some SchemeLanguage in HS). I'm looking at possibilities for embedding Lisp into the game. Lisp makes many problems trivial and I am already imagining some interesting capabilities.
Some of these scenarios would probably require writing my own interpreter/compiler. I found the sl3.c source but I find it a bit crude for my uses.
So let me see if I can do the proper WikiWiki thing here and refer to LispForGames.
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Jacob Repp