My Challenges As A Fresh Programmer

My Challenges As A Fresh Programmer

In this post, I will briefly describe my journey from a newbie programmer to a confident coder. I was very nervous when I started my first job as a programmer. We were a bunch of ten to fifteen coders, and we worked on packages individually.

 

We had a boss who explained the requirements and supervised us as and when needed. He was a kind man who let us use our imagination and innovative abilities to the fullest.

 

The company was into medical software. The first program I wrote was for automating a Personality Inventory based on a person’s choice of colours. The C programming language is normally used for developing systems software, but I used it for this program anyway. I also worked in Clipper and FoxBASE which were much easier to handle. Then came the real challenges.

 

I was asked to develop programs for improving the cognitive abilities of people suffering from attention deficit disorder. My boss told me to use Turbo-C. He gave me a black-bound book of functions in Turbo-C. I was sound with the fundamentals of C but this black book my boss handed over inspired me to become a very confident programmer. I had initially read a book titled The Spirit of C which was a rather slow painstaking read. Nevertheless, I read the book thoroughly which resulted in my having sound fundamentals.

 

I will explain two programs I wrote that boosted my confidence in my abilities as a programmer to the utmost. Look at the image above. Imagine the above screen moving upwards continuously while the bar at the centre remains stationary. As the screen moves the top step with the gap in the middle disappears, and a new step with a gap appears at the bottom. All the while the vertical bar in the middle stays as it is. But it can be turned to the right or left with the arrow keys to avoid hitting the steps. What a patient had to do was to use the keys and prevent the bar from touching any step as the screen moved upwards. It was a finger-tapping exercise meant to improve the attention span of people suffering from ADHD.

 

This might probably sound laughably easy to people reading this article now, but in those days, resources were not as abundant as they are now. There was no Google, and it was not possible to search the internet and get ready-made solutions. Remember this was in the year 1990. I had to find out everything from the books I had at my disposal.

 

I will briefly describe the technical details. I don’t remember very clearly what functions I used though I have a general idea. After all, it has been thirty-five years since I worked on it. I think I used the Turbo-C function interrupt 21H to call a Dos routine with which I simulated the screen moving effect. The screen as we all know is divided into X and Y coordinates and every time there was an overlap in the coordinates of the bar in the middle and the step, I stopped the game, and the patient had to start fresh again. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But I had to struggle with it quite a bit at that time.

 

There was another program that I attempted which was noteworthy. I created a rectangular matrix of numbers. At a time a single number would be blinking somewhere in this matrix. The patient had to move the cursor rapidly to the blinking number and press the return key and the number would disappear. There was also a time element involved. In this way, the entire matrix of numbers had to be exhausted.

 

All these programs I wrote early in my career contributed to my skills as a good coder. I also worked in Visual Basic 6 and Perl. Later I switched over to web programming and that was a different ball game altogether. However, these early programming challenges were the ones that helped me the most.