When I was in high school, “game programmer” meant at best BASIC or at worst 6502 assembly language, but either way, lots of text manipulation. These days, high school-age programmers are going to camps and programming competitions having spent their time in drag-n-drop programming environments like Game Maker. They’ve been doing work flow for 7 versions already!
Yesterday, I was a judge and the keynote speaker at a high school game programming contest. After asking a bunch of the 25 teams questions about their games, I was asked to speak about careers in software to 100 high school computer geeks. My people!
Recently, I went to lunch with some friends of mine from the DevelopMentor Software days (wow, *that* was a long time ago) and they accused me of “radio silence” for the last two years.
I friend of mine dropped a book with a funny cover in my lap and said, “Hey, check this out.” I threw it on my pile and didn’t get back to it for a few days. When I did, I didn’t know what to make of it. It was like The Grapes of Wrath by Rory Blyth, with illustrations by a drunk Salvador Dali.
It took a few pages, but I eventually figured out that “Shoes” was a cross-platform GUI framework for Ruby and this 52-page book was a tutorial for it. By page 15, I knew the major concepts. By page 20, I could write my first program. By the end, 30 minutes after I’d started reading, I knew the whole thing.
Don turned me onto the Walking Dead series of “graphic novels” (I’m too proud to call them “comic books!“) and I loved them. I read volumes 1-4 in one day when I should’ve been doing other things.
Don thinks that they’re good enough for a Lost-esque style 10pm cable TV show and I agree. The interplay of characters and watching them fall apart under the pressure is fascinating. The zombies are there, but it’s mostly a background thing, like IRS agents when you forget to include the check (I wrote it! I swear I did!).
Quetzal Bradley is a software development engineer (SDE) on my team with *tons* of experience in all manner of infrastructure stuff including the requirements of real-world software testing from the trenches at Microsoft.
Q gave a talk about what comes after unit testing to my team and I was blown away, so I sent him to tell Scott about it so that you could hear it, too.
