I’m a software developer who has focused on Borland Delphi for 13 years, and am now working in Java and .net technologies. Originally from Manchester in the UK, I now live in Cleveland, Ohio in the US.

I’ve spent a lot of time programming after starting with a Commodore 64 when I was 10 years old. I moved on to an Amstrad CPC 6128 which even came with a floppy disk drive. I started writing in Z80 Assembly Language using Maxam.

Soon my brother bought an Amiga and since he was in the navy, it gave me plenty of time to get acquainted with it. I soon started learning about 68000 Assembly language by writing mini-demos and games. I wrote a few articles that were published on disk magazines that were in circulation at time as this was before the internet and bulletin boards were out of my reach as a 16 year old with no phone in my room.

I still have my copy of the Hardware reference manual, and my copy of Devpac. Plus I have a 512k memory upgrade that cost about 400 pounds (about $600) and my hard drive which was incredibly small for the price at the time. I remember spending most of my student grant on Amiga hardware and software for development purposes. At university, I wrote a logical circuit designer using assembly language. That certainly taught me a few things about making code modular when I wrote the routine to find the end of a linked list for the tenth time. I would spend my summers while at university staying up till 4am writing code in assembly language, watching Sneakers and Tron over and over. Actually I think I also did that during school terms as well. That would explain a lot…

I then had to get serious and started working on a PC with a C++ compiler where I got interested in 3D graphics, both real time and realistic. Once I graduated from University, I took a job at an accounting firm and on day two, someone threw me a box containing Delphi and told me to go learn it so I did. I got pretty good and went on some consulting gigs as a Delphi programmer. As I was away from home a lot, I would spend time reading up on Java which was new at the time. I took the odd job using C and even VB (shudder) but luckily, I got to play to my strengths with Delphi. I moved over to the US in 1999, and have been here since. I have worked mostly as a Delphi programmer with a consulting firm but after 5 years, switched to something more secure 5 years ago. Also in the last few years, what had been a casual relationship with Java turned in to something more serious and I started spearheading our shift to Java technology full time.

The last few years have shown me a couple of things. Firstly, I was so lucky to work with a solid stable workhorse like Delphi for so many years. It really is a pity that there is no Java equivalent for Delphi and the eco system is so fragmented. It also taught me that I really had a lot more to learn about programming. I think my skills have matured and grown in the last few years as much as they had in the rest of my professional career. Not only from a programming perspective but in terms of the development process, thinking about coding, using OOP correctly, and writing proper code. Over the last 6 years or so, I have consumed everything from the Mythical Man Month to Code Complete to Effective Java to The Pragmatic Programmer, and the GoF as well as technical books on concurrency, Ejbs, Spring, Hibernate and Orms, java web frameworks, more web frameworks, and even .net..

It’s been interesting learning this stuff, and continuing to learn it as new technology comes along For someone who loves programming, its like a whole different canvas to paint on.

Cheers,

Andy Gibson