Title: The Wall

Hello James,

In response to: How do I view the programming part of my life?

I originally joined the ACCU as a hobbyist. I had a little programming experience at college (Basic and Fortran), but my true inspiration came to me while at work. My dad owned a grocery store in rural eastern Virginia, and I evolved into a sort of 'system administrator', among other things since I was the only one who could do a little more than turn on a PC. Our business grew and we eventually updated our equipment to two PC's and a front-end-scanning system. The front-end, and the two PC's were all wired together (I guess that would be called a network!) and information was transmitted via modem to and from the warehouse. The desire to learn more about programming surfaced as a result of my trying to improve the performance of data sharing between systems, which required creating and formatting batches of item data and sending it from the 'main' PC to the front-end-PC, to two other applications, and then to the warehouse mainframe. I also wrote batch files, menus and application scripts, to make this hodge-podge of a system easier for our employees to use.

I poked around, and asked questions as to which language would be best to learn. I decided on C++. What a daunting task that turned out to be! I bought several books, learned about objects and classes, polymorphism and inheritance, and discovered the ACCU. I managed to write a couple of console apps that bridged some gaps between the software at work, but I also laid the foundation for the future that I am realizing today.

The county grew, competition moved in, and we went out of business. After twenty years of grocery store employment I have chosen a new path. I took a job close to home as a carpenter, and have returned to school, online. I am a computer science major at Mercy College in New York City. I have just completed two semesters of Java, and I am participating in the mentored Java project here at ACCU. The project provides an excellent duality in my development as programmer. Where else can you find a consortium of experts, willing to help you gain experience in this field for free? I don't know of any.

Well there you have it,