Chessboxing is a hybrid sport which combines boxing with chess in alternating rounds. The sport began when Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh, inspired by fictional depictions by French comic book artist and filmmaker Enki Bilal, organized actual bouts. Chess boxing is now growing in popularity. Participants must be both skilled boxers and chess players, as a match may be won either way...

YouTube Video

YouTube Video

In regard to my previous post. I spend many hours in front of a computer every day. In fact, I know precisely that I spent 2268 hours in 2003 (I know this thanks to my LCD monitor counter back then). So it was an average 6 hours per day. But since 2004, due to my full-time programming job, that time has increased even more. The computers are now my everyday tool, so I don't limit myself only to the programming activities, but I also do Web surfing, instant communication and watching movies and TV shows regularly. It's now quite common to spend even more than 12 hours a day.

So, let me assume that my average time in front of a computer was 9 hours per day in the last 15 years. This means that I spent a total of 49275 hours, which gives the continuous 5.6 years so far...

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!