Karl Katzke

This is going around like a bad cold, but here goes.

How old were you when you started programming?
I first tried at 12, but couldn’t get started in a way that was meaningful to me. I ran into a problem at 18 in college that I solved with an Access database.

How did you get started in programming?
That access database needed to be glued together with a lot of VBA to make it work the way we needed it to. I read a book and just jumped from topic to topic reading the bare minimum I needed to make it work. Unlike most programmers, I wasn

What was your first language?
VBA, then VB6, then Bash shell scripting, then PHP, and from then it was on.

What was the first real program you wrote?
Probably a VB6 program for a class. The first one that stuck around for a while was in PHP3.

What languages have you used since you started programming?
VBA, VB6, PHP, Shell scripting, Java, Python, Perl, C#, and VB.net

What was your first professional programming gig?
Writing shell scripts and regular expressions to update OregonLive automatically with a minimum of cleanup. All the text for the site at the time was sent over in the Oregonian’s custom typesetting language.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Yeah, probably. I still say that programmers who want to work with the toys because they’re shiny and they enjoy making them do things should not go into programming at all — they belong in computer science research. The programmers I enjoy working with are the ones who use the programming tools to solve problems. They also recognize that maintainability and future-proofing ARE problems and code in ways that solve them.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
Do read other people’s code. Don’t read their comments. If you can’t understand what it’s doing from the code, then throw the code out because the comments aren’t worth reading. Code in a way that keeps things simple and makes things easy. Easy, simple systems are easy to maintain and reliable. Don’t over engineer it or try to be clever because you’ll only end up creating something that will get thrown out shortly because it’s hard to keep working.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had?
Um, with my clothes on? Seriously, get out and live a little. It’s not all about programming. Programmers work to solve problems that people run into, and unless you’ve got life skills and social skills, you won’t be able to understand the problems sometimes.