Scoble as a Programmer??
I really enjoy reading Scoble's weblog. This guy is, to use his own word, lit. Every week or so he'll post something that will just reverberate through the weblogging community. He gets excited about the Table PC, boom, people are talking about the tablet PC. He goes to the MVP summit, boom, people are talking about the MVP summit. His opinions are always fresh. He dares you to prove him wrong and if you do, he admits he's wrong, thanks you, and encourages you to get out there and do more.
Now, he wants to be a programmer. Already, advice is flowing in (BTW, what's up with Keith Ballinger's weblog? If you click on the link for his post on this issue it takes you to a page that doesn't include that post...) on how to do it. My take: there's no one way to do it. It might be helpful if he told us why he wants to do this.
In my own case, I came late to programming. I wrote my first computer program at the age of 36 and was largely self-taught. Finding good books that resonated with me was key. I liked books with interesting example programs and exercises at the end of each chapter. Once I got the basics down, I started looking for stuff that I or other folks used to do by hand but could write programs for and just figured out how to do them. At the time, I was an electronic technician at a company that manufactured industrial bar code printers (they just moved from making paper tape punch machines, which was a dying market). I saw some of the software engineer folks having to make custom eproms for customers that wanted special characters designing those characters by hand using graph paper. So, in my spare time, I wrote a basic program that would allow people to graphically design their characters on an Atari PC using a joystick (mice didn't come with computers until later...). The program was slow and clunky but way better than doing it by hand. I learned a ton doing that program and never looked back.
Good luck, Robert.
2:50:00 AM 
|
|
