2 Days To Go

Why am I spending 120 hrs+ this month writing code to give away? That's what keeps going through my head. I know what's going to happen. I'll create a bad ass prototype of something and feel the desire to keep it for myself.

Well first off, I write tons of prototypes at home, and never end up doing anything with them. So I might as well toss them out there for the good of the world.

Secondly, I've spent the last 21 years of my life as a developer. Yes, I'm only 28 but I started writing code when I was 7. Nothing spectacular - at that time it was mostly hacks of existing programs.

How did I get started? GW-BASIC. GW-BASIC was not compiled (typically from what I remember, or maybe I just got demos. Who knows, I was 7), so when you got software (at a trade show or in a mag - there was no "downloading" concept, duh) you could just open the BAS file and look at the source. Because of that early open source ability, I became the coder that I am today.

Since then we've come a long way, but even today much of my job is spent learning how to do things by looking at the public domain. My toolset includes google groups, pinvoke.org, and krugle. To do my job, I need to look at other people's code and other people's experiences. So here's my contribution back to the world that's given a ton of free knowledge to me. Don't ask for anything else damnit.

I'll start tonight, by giving away a wicked app that I wrote recently. It's a gorgeous magnifier application that I developed for some vision impaired friends at my office. Through them I learned that Microsoft's magnifier sucks. Check it out on the download blog (See navigation on the right??).