15 Years of Programming

This month I am celebrating a 15 year anniversary of my programming activities. I remember January 1995, when I, then being 12, fiddled with a source code in AMOS BASIC. Looking further back in time, it was the year before, when I tried to fire up my first project - some set of examples from the technical encyclopedia, but back then I would not go beyond AmigaDOS scripts. Since 1995 I began discovering programming in a procedural language, BASIC. During 3 years that followed I wrote several programs, among them a full-fledged Ezine implementation and some never-actually-finished strategic games. One of most interesting examples was an implementation of a classic Pong game, which I wrote sometime in 1996. I was very proud of what I had managed to create, because the program featured three game modes: player 1 vs. player 2, player 1 vs. player 1, and player vs. computer! At the bottom of the screen there was an additional attraction - a drawing of a human face, (inspired by the game Doom) whose expression reflected the game level you were in. The higher you went, the more perplexed the face looked :).

I managed to dig out two samples of my code from those times, although I'm not sure they are complete:

The more I tried, the more I wanted to go further expanding my knowledge, so that in 1998 I began studying C. I was greatly helped by excellent, albeit strongly oriented on that particular operating system, articles of Kamil Iskra in the Amiga Magazine as well as by the book "The C Programming Language", which I read from title-page to colophon.

In the years that followed I was discovering new programming languages, improving programming techniques, and writing thousands of lines of code in each successive month. I must have written quite a number of them in these 15 years, although I probably would never know the exact number. According to Ohloh.net, which keeps track of a selected subset of my projects in public repositories, the number of lines I wrote or changed goes beyond 100 thousand. Taking in the account the fact that each line is often a result of 5 rewriting attempts, and adding thereto several other (not at all small) projects, test programs written while studying new languages and a bunch of code written in my work as a professional programmer (full-time job since 2004), I may estimate the total amount to be some 2 millions of lines. And, since I am by no means tired, I am going to write more still. There are lots of programs ahead of me!

Google Reader Tracks Everything

Most people may not know, but Google Reader tracks every single entry you have ever read and there is no way to clear that list even if you remove all your subscriptions. Check out this link:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/-/state/com.google/read

For me, this page shows some very old entries from the subscriptions I removed a very long time ago and there is now way to wipe it out! For this reason I wouldn't use Google Reader. (FYI, I use Cheetah News, which is a far better reader anyway, at least for me.)

Lifestreaming

As some people already know, I recently launched my own lifestream (or Stream for short). In effect, my weblog will be updated even less often. My new stream is powered by the gLifestream platform.

gLifestream is a free lifestream platform and social activity reader. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3.

gLifestream joins several external and/or internal streams into a single one. External streams may be represented by RSS/Atom channels or popular services such as Twitter or FriendFeed. The user decides which of them are publicly visible and which are not. Public streams are visible for anybody. The rest of streams are visible only for logged in users.

Read more about GLS at glifestream.gnu.org.ua.