Jason Sidabras

So 6,825,600 seconds ago Aaron did a “call-out” to describe my software upbringing. It seems that because of a quite non-engineering conference I am at, I have some extra time. Not sure if I can think of people who I need to call out to keep this going, but if someone feels after reading this to fill out such a bio — link me!

How old were you when you started programming?

I guess my first programming experience was when I was 13 or so, where I would toy around with my Commodore 64. Besides the simple load commands, I took a few days to figure out how to get an old dot-matrix printer working. Growing up my parents would never let me use white-out or anything while using an olde timey type-writer. So I did what any engineer would do, find a way to make my life easier. After reading all of the manuals and writing some code I finally got it to print “Hello” (I didn’t know about ‘Hello World!’). After that, I never got it working again and went back to my type-writter to quickly finish a report that was due. I think the one thing that stands out is that my mom constantly told me, “If you took as much time finding a way to not do your work and just DO your work, you would be done by now.” In which I respond, “Yeah but what fun is that!”.

The next real programming I got into was in high school. Where two things occurred: i) I got a PC and into viruses and ii) we had a mainframe at my high school with all of the UNIX manuals behind me and another friend of mine Cyborgface.

What was your first language?

There wasn’t anything I really sat down and learned for quite some time. I did a lot of HTML code and dabbled in some C and assembly. I did a lot of hex debugging and trying to understand polymorphism. Which I’ve never gotten. But to be fair I only cared about it for viruses. Now I dabble into some “smart” programming with lisp and other genetic algorithms. Haven’t done anything myself yet.

Also I spent a lot of time trying to embed and execute viruses from images. This seemed to be a head of its time because multiple vulnerabilities have been found in the way windows executed jpgs and such which someone figured out to embed and execute the code. Otherwise there is gifar now, which allows you to embed a jar file to be executed after the gif loads.

What was the first program you wrote?

I think we had to do some QBasic in high school, only because I remember screwing around with the graphics stuff. But I’d guess the first program I wrote was mainly webpages and some hacks on 2600 scripts. It wasn’t until college that I got into other programming languages and started making far more complicated programs in C, php and bash.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Basic, VB, FORTRAN, C/C++/C#, Assembly (M68HC11, 8051), VHDL,  HTML, javascript, python, lisp, bash (and other shells), Mathematica, Matlab and others I’m sure. I’ve dabbled in quite a bit and a lot of random code passes by me and my searches. It doesn’t take me very much to learn a programming language but it takes a lot to be good at it. By far the most I use these days is Python, Mathematica, HTML and javascript. Python and Mathematica being my favorite.

What was your first professional programming gig?

Never had a real professional gig. But I have tried on numerous occasions to write complex websites. First being a web hosting company, where I focused on security… to much. I spent an entire summer writing a front end in php/mysql back in 2001 and although the user security was marvelous, the website wasn’t complete. I also have two projects now (to be mentioned at the appropriate time) in which I would like to finish. One should fund the other. I plan on finishing one of them next semester… post Master’s thesis.

If you knew then what you know now, would have started programming?

Of course. I would probably make sure I did more BSD hacking and other hardware work instead of screwing around with f’in peoples stuff up.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

I’ve learned the 4 stages of a programmer:

1. In-line programming
2. Functional Programming
3. Module Programming
4. Object-Orientated Programming

It took me many years to go from 3 to 4, but I will never go back! For a new programmer I would recommend working on learning from other people’s code. There are tons of opinions out there and you will learn a lot from the people who fit into these categories.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had programming?

I always have fun programming when I get the chance to do some real work. I would say my 2-d finite-element modeling program would be up there. Along with all the ideas in my head having to do with self-learning machines. But that is a long way off. I also have quite a bit of fun in Lisp.

Who am I calling out?

Well I guess I will call out Cyborgface, only because he is the only one not intercepted in the Joe, Aaron and Steve blogosphere. Otherwise I call out YOU… reader.

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