Quote:How old are you? (Optional)

I am 24 years old.

Quote:How long have you been programming?

I've been programming since I was about 16 - roughly 8 years. Although, only in the last couple years have I felt like all the stuff I've learned has started to congeal. So even now I feel like I'm still on my way to realizing my full potential.

Quote:What would you say is the hardest thing about being a programmer?

The hardest part for me is maintaining an active interest. This is largely the result of getting a full-time programming job. My hobby became my job. I used to spend much of my free time at home programming, but these days, the last thing I want to do with my free time is sit in front of a computer.

I do enjoy programming, but for some reason I feel like I need to invest programming time outside of work in order to put some of my real, raw passion into some work of my own vision. Although I'm starting to feel like that is a silly feeling to have (I can do the same in my projects at work).

It's also hard to get excited about projects that you don't necessarily believe in, or think are a valuable contribution to some group or society in general. Luckily those projects are in the minority.

Quote:What personal programming achievement are you proudest of?

Getting a job at a game development company, and positively contributing to the existing programming team.

Quote:What's the most embarrassing mistake you ever made?

Probably when I managed to check in some test code with, as my boss described it, 'colorful' text. A build of this code was naturally sent to our client (at that time the military), and, as clients do, they managed to find the offending text. Luckily my boss is a pretty understanding guy (having been a programmer for many years himself), and he didn't really chew me out for it.

I still felt like an idiot though. [sad]

The text wasn't really that bad overall, but it contained a mild expletive or two, and was certainly not of a quality acceptable by the military.

Quote:Do you think you'll stay with programming for the rest of your career?

Probably. I enjoy it, I'd like to think I'm pretty good at it, and I believe I am capable of making valuable contributions to my workplace.

Quote:How old are you? (Optional)

24 (What's up with that?)

Quote:How long have you been programming?

Started when I was 11, so ~13 years
My "language path" was: Basic -> (Object-)Pascal -> Ada -> &#106avascript -> PHP -> C -> Java -> C++ -> Erlang -> Haskell

Quote:What would you say is the hardest thing about being a programmer?

Writing beautiful code (i.e. code that you look at once and immediately understand what it's doing)

Quote:What personal programming achievement are you proudest of?

Probably this and my Script-Compiler/VM/JIT

Quote:What's the most embarrassing mistake you ever made?

I used to have stuff like

std::cout << "fuck" << std::endl;

in my code to see which control paths the app would take (yes I know about breakpoints, thank you very much). Needless to say, I forgot one of those in my code when I demo-ed an app to a customer. Luckily they didn't pay much attention to the console output but at that moment, my heart must've stopped.
Of course that was years ago and I'm not as reckless now as I was then.

Quote:Do you think you'll stay with programming for the rest of your career?

I dunno. I generally lose interest in whatever I do after about 3 years which is why I went from app development to web development to game development to compiler development. Maybe one day I'll lose interest in programming altogether... Actually no, don't think that'll happen.

Quote:Be sure to put plenty of thought into your answers; enjoy!

Okay

How old are you? (Optional)
25

How long have you been programming?
I started when I was 11 or 12 (probably 10 years, 6 "professional" since I skipped out on college) on an Apple 2e before I moved up to a Tandy 1000! There as a long gap in there though when I didn't own a computer at all until I bought one for myself.

What would you say is the hardest thing about being a programmer?
I'd say putting up with other programmers. It may be my area, or just my luck that all the other programmers I have ever worked with in person have been terrible. The types who pick up programming because it pays well, not because of any passion for it or problem solving.

What personal programming achievement are you proudest of?
Hard to say. So much time has been wasted on work projects that aren't very exciting. Probably getting PHP to generate PDFs dynamically from HTML by running system commands and capturing the binary output and injecting it into the http response. In retrospect though, generating files on disk and caching them would have made more sense.

What's the most embarrassing mistake you ever made?
This is a tough one. The one that stands out the most recently is getting pissed off at how crappy .NET handled web services because none of my methods were showing up. Turns out I copied from an interface and then added implementation details but forgot to add public for each of my methods.

Do you think you'll stay with programming for the rest of your career?
I hope not. I find programming to be boring. I love solving the problems though.

-I'm 32
-I've been programming in some fasion or another for 22 years.
-Getting the info you need. This includes reaserching new technologies as well as learning to read the minds of your clients so that you give them the features that they really want but don't know how to explain.
-(Don't know how much detail I can give but) a recent upgrade to a website that will hopefully make things easier for lots of average ordinary people. Other than that, I'm quite pleased just to have a job doing something I enjoy.
-Deploying the wrong file to production which ended up getting a half dozen people out of bed in the early hours of the morning to figure out what went wrong. I don't want to think about what the contractors involved ended up charging for such a simple mistake.
-I hope so.

How old are you?
23.

How long have you been programming?
Since age 6.

What would you say is the hardest thing about being a programmer?
Having to coexist with horrible programmers.

What personal programming achievement are you proudest of?
Writing a version-control system from scratch and actually having copies sell over the internet (I have since discontinued the product).

Do you think you'll stay with programming for the rest of your career?
Yes.

• How old are you?
  27.


• How long have you been programming?
  15 years.


• What would you say is the hardest thing about being a programmer?
  I honestly don't know anymore. My web habits have the side-effect of keeping me aware of most new developments, and most of them merely express familiar concepts in new ways for a given language. I think the hardest thing is probably the buzzword bullshit you have to wade through when in the job market.


• What personal programming achievement are you proudest of?
  Early stuff, I'd say - figuring out multi-file C++ linking when I was 15, learning to use the Visual C++ debugger to track down logic errors at 17, picking up Perl in 4 days to take over maintenance of a whole repository of scripts at 19... Everything since has basically been a matter of patience, comprehension and tedium.


• What's the most embarrassing mistake you ever made?
  I was merging some significant breaking work into trunk, and I decided to set the eol style property (Subversion) on my branch. Well, somehow the merge ended up modifying every single file in the repository! (For the uninitiated, this is functionally fine, but makes it impossible to determine which files were actually changed as a result of the merge.)


• Do you think you'll stay with programming for the rest of your career?
  No. I'm already plotting my exit.