I started in 1988 on a VIC-20 and a TI CC-40, typing BASIC listings out of magazines and then changing them to see what would happen. Most of what I learned came from the changes rather than the listings.
What followed
The 8-bit machines led to Pascal, C, and assembly on the 6502 and x86. Then the web arrived, and with it Perl, PHP, JavaScript, and Python.
Two of those projects outlasted the era. In 1994 I started Geeks Anonymous, a community for the technical and strange. In 2004 I put up Pastebin.ca, which grew into one of the most-visited sites in Canada.
Current work is mostly TypeScript, Go, Rust, and Python, with Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes, and Docker underneath whenever something has to actually run somewhere.
What I’m curious about now
- LLMs and AI-assisted tooling, including the parts that still don’t work
- Rust for systems programming and WebAssembly
- Home automation, one sensor at a time
Thirty-odd years in, the language still isn’t the interesting part. I keep picking up new ones because each one rearranges which problems are easy to state, and that rearrangement is usually where the idea comes from.
Whatever I’m building at the moment ends up on the projects page.