Software has played a big part in my life. My first computer program, haltingly trancribed at the age of 6 from a blackboard on to a Commodore VIC-20 one afternoon during my first summer at day camp, read something like this:

    10 PRINT "HELLO! ";
    20 GOTO 10

Since that moment, a lot of things have changed, but the immediate interest I found in writing code hasn't been one of them. My elementary school soon had us writing LOGO on Apple ][es, and at home I spent innumerable hours poking at an Atari 800XL hooked up to an old black and white TV, until Dad brought home a PC AT clone, a 10 MHz 80286 running MS-DOS 3.1 on - wow - a 30 meg hard drive. I wrote dodgy EGA adventure games, saved up for parts, and got my own machine - a second hand Epson PC XT running a mere 4.77 MHz. Not long after I got my own phone line and started a BBS in the 215. Boy, those were the days. If it weren't for those BBSes, I would probably still have no social skills.

In 1996 I started learning Perl to better my earlier attempts at writing CGI apps with an ugly swill of tcsh, sed, and awk, and in 1999 I finally took the plunge and installed Linux on a machine of my own. By then, I had already quit my job at the gas station to write software more or less full-time. In the intervening years, Free Software has put a roof over my head, lead me to travel more and more of the world every year, introduced me to the most amazing people, brought me and my wife together, made us write a book, and someday, Tao not-willing, it might feed our children.

Inspired by Jo's devlog, I recently decided to begin cataloguing my ongoing adventures in code.