I found the challenge by chance. It was so long ago I don't exactly remember when. Thought it was 2015 but an old comment of mine on HN seems to indicate I may have started looking into this back in 2014, when I was still using a core-i5 CPU : )
> Can you tell us a bit more about your self-taught background?
Sure... I started programming in BASIC at 11 years old on the most inconceivable setup ever: an Atari 2600, which was a gaming console (the infamous one which lead to the video industry crash of 1983 with a landfill filled with E.T. cartdridges). So how do you write BASIC on that at 11 years old? Well your mom offers you a "BASIC cartridge" which comes with a keyboard in two parts you plug in the joystick ports! (horrible experience but I do remember writing tiny programs drawing colored lines using that).
Then the Commodore C-64: more BASIC, some assembly using a "power cartrigde", mainly to modify (hack?) games. Then the Commodore Amiga: learning to write intros and demos. Then the PC (386, 486, and so on): writing a video game (finished but never published but it landed me my first job: long way too long story), writing more intros and demos (won a PC demo compo in Sweden). I'll blog one day (when I'll have a blog) about that PC / DOS video game which was running at 60 Hz on a 386 because it used a cool collision detection method I came up with (which as far as I know is unique and was pixel perfect even back then and was and still is particularly efficient). I still do have both the source and the binary for that game.
For the languages I mainly did BASIC then assembly (680x0 and 80x86), C with inline assembly, C++, Java... Then I stuck with Java for a very long time. Got a Sun Certified Java Programmer certification around 2000 (which makes me an oldtimer): only cert I ever got.
I cannot say I didn't do boring Java consultancy for even more boring companies/organizations. And thankfully once in a while a fun professional project ; )
Nowadays I'm still programming in Java as for my own projects I like to write proof of concepts using Clojure (and ClojureScript). And as I'm an Emacs (IntelliJ for Java though) user if of course waste a lot of time with elisp, hacking my Emacs config!
> Can you tell us a bit more about your self-taught background?
Sure... I started programming in BASIC at 11 years old on the most inconceivable setup ever: an Atari 2600, which was a gaming console (the infamous one which lead to the video industry crash of 1983 with a landfill filled with E.T. cartdridges). So how do you write BASIC on that at 11 years old? Well your mom offers you a "BASIC cartridge" which comes with a keyboard in two parts you plug in the joystick ports! (horrible experience but I do remember writing tiny programs drawing colored lines using that).
Then the Commodore C-64: more BASIC, some assembly using a "power cartrigde", mainly to modify (hack?) games. Then the Commodore Amiga: learning to write intros and demos. Then the PC (386, 486, and so on): writing a video game (finished but never published but it landed me my first job: long way too long story), writing more intros and demos (won a PC demo compo in Sweden). I'll blog one day (when I'll have a blog) about that PC / DOS video game which was running at 60 Hz on a 386 because it used a cool collision detection method I came up with (which as far as I know is unique and was pixel perfect even back then and was and still is particularly efficient). I still do have both the source and the binary for that game.
For the languages I mainly did BASIC then assembly (680x0 and 80x86), C with inline assembly, C++, Java... Then I stuck with Java for a very long time. Got a Sun Certified Java Programmer certification around 2000 (which makes me an oldtimer): only cert I ever got.
I cannot say I didn't do boring Java consultancy for even more boring companies/organizations. And thankfully once in a while a fun professional project ; )
Nowadays I'm still programming in Java as for my own projects I like to write proof of concepts using Clojure (and ClojureScript). And as I'm an Emacs (IntelliJ for Java though) user if of course waste a lot of time with elisp, hacking my Emacs config!
I hope you still love HN ; )