Looking Back

Several years (2004 maybe) ago I was working grave yard at a mill and we had a bit of down time from time to time in the evening. Purely out of curiosity I picked up Visual Basic book and started reading it. VB is pretty common in industrial environments which is why I picked it.

I started looking at repetitive and cumbersome things that I was doing and started making my own tools to make my job easier, more efficient. Around the time that VB.NET 2008 was released I started using that platform. Although my job is not exactly to programming computers (I program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmable_logic_control..." target="_blank">PLC's]/url]), I still use it quite a bit.

I've been studying Python lately just to see something a little different. To make it more interesting, I switch to Linux at home about 8 months ago.

I also bought myself an Arduino recently so I'll be tinkering with that too.

In college in the late 70's started with fortran, and punch cards, moved up to basic, basica and gwbasic, after that I was out of the programming loop, but now have to get back into it, c++, sql, python, java linux and klingon   (Wierd Al white and nerdy reference)

How far are you in C++? If you need a fellow programmer to tread the way with you I'm learning C++ also...I'm actually thinking about putting tutorials up on Youtube, just to reinforce what I'm learning and to help others out. If you haven't started you could follow along.

Started in mid 90's with turbo pascal, then got into C/C++. I am a full time professional programmer since I finished coledge a few years ago and during my student years I was a part time programmer. Now I still use C++ a lot, but due to need, added C# and SQL to that 6 years ago, with one very short "trip" to Objective-C.