My programming

  • Earliest coding memory: Copying a BASIC game out of some kind of magazine, I have no idea which one. My father worked at Radio Shack, so we had computers almost as early as I can remember-- I'm not sure what it was first, but the one that was a big deal was the Tandy 1000 with Windows 3.1. I also spent a ridiculous amount of time on the Apple IIe machines at school, especially Oregon Trail.

  • MUSHing: This was where I actually got started. I'd been knocking around on the internet starting mid-high school, largely on the Prodigy forums (with limited online hours and per-email costs-- I don't miss those!). Somewhere, and I have no recollection anymore of where, I ran into MUSHes and MUDs. The very first one I ever connected to was DragonMUD, a glorious little place where you wandered around collecting titles by solving little (and sometimes not-so-little) puzzles people had built into rooms. I never built any of my own there, but shortly afterward I landed on Two Moons and was introduced to the creation of puppets, personally-coded widgets. From pretty much the moment I taught my pet wolf puppet to run around the area on its own, I was hooked. MUSHing is absolutely why I'm a programmer today.