Programming background

I started working with computers at the age of 8/10 ( I can't really remember exactly :-) ). Our first home computer was a 4.77 Mhz XT with 256Kb of RAM, no hard drive, a monochrome screen and two 360Kb floppy drives. After mastering games such a Donkey Kong, started learning about DOS. At about 12/13 years of age a starting "programming" with batch files and then discovered something called "GW-Basic". About a year and a half later of programming with GW-Basic I discovered Turbo Pascal (version 5.0 I think). At the age of 15 (std 7) I moved up to Turbo Pascal 6.0 and started learning about the wonderful world of object-orientated programming. At 17 (std 9) I landed a part-time job with a company called Stargate. (Strange that the very first bit of software besides DOS that I ever saw was a game called Stargate.) At Stargate I taught myself to program in Turbo Pascal for Windows 1.5. Two years later (1st year varsity) I started programming in Delphi 1.0. A year later I started mastering C++ and I am currently using C++ Builder and Delphi 3.0.

I am pretty fluent in HTML ( hence these pages ) and have been playing around with Javascript somewhat, ie, banners in the status bar. I have also been using and configuring Linux on my PC and I have started to learn about Java programming. I can also program in Perl and ML reasonably well.

After my degree I would like to become a certified Borland developer. I would very much like to hear from anyone who has become certified and hear their viewpoint. I would also like to improve on my Java programming skills and may be become a certified Java programmer, as offered by Sun Microsystems.

This document was last modified 2 May 1998.