#005 – Programmer Nostalgia with Kevin Grossnicklaus

Kevin Grossnicklaus is an old school developer who lives in St. Louis, MO and runs a great team of 7 developers at his company ArchitectNow. At ArchitectNow, he and his team build apps targeting a variety of platforms ranging from web to desktop to mobile. When not building apps for customers, Kevin can be found traveling, chicken pickin’ on his Telecaster, or tracking his expanding amount of grey hair thanks to his three teenage daughters. He’s also still holding out for a second season of Firefly.

Kevin is also the co-author of Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2017.

In this episode, Derek Hatchard and Ron Smith join Kevin in reminiscing about early programming experiences on personal computers from the 80s and discuss why curiosity and a desire to learn are so important for software professionals. In November 2017, Kevin wrote the blog post “A Touch of Applesoft Basic” about his early programming experiences and introducing his 80s and 90s tech to younger software developers. Check it out for photos of the things Kevin talks about in this episode of Ardent Development.

Where to find Kevin Grossnicklaus

@kvgros on Twitter

On the web at http://architectnow.net/blog/

In print at Building Web Applications with Visual Studio 2017

Enjoy the show and be sure to follow Ardent Development on Twitter.

Follow @ardentdev

Transcript

Derek: Welcome to the Ardent Development podcast. I’m Derek. And today Ron and I are on with Kevin Grossnicklaus. Did I say that right, Kevin?

Kevin: You did, it’s good enough.

Derek: Alright, good enough. Kevin is an old school developer who lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Say it the right way. And runs a great team of seven developers at his company ArchitectNow. At ArchitectNow they build apps targeting a variety of platforms ranging from web to desktop to mobile. When not building apps, Kevin can be found traveling, chicken pickin’ on his Telecaster or tracking his expanding amount of grey hairs thanks to his three teenage daughters. And he’s still holding out for a second season of Firefly. And I’m right there with you. Right there with you. For those of us who are in Canada which is where Ron and I, you might need to explain what chicken pickin’ is.

Kevin: Oh I’m a country guitar player. So American country music old school country music. I’m a Merle Haggard / Johnny Cash type guitar player. I’ve been doing it a long time.

Derek: Alright. So, Kevin, I saw the blog post that you wrote. It really resonated with me and you were going back looking at sort of how you got into programming stuff that you used to work on.

Derek: And I think it all sprung from building a bit of a museum in your new office. You want to give us a little bit of the backstory for that blog post.

Kevin: Sure. As you said it really it was thanks to the power of eBay. I was putting some technology in a new office we had built and buying some things that I had owned a few old, my original Nintendo and an original game cube and things like that that my wife wanted me to get out of the house. So I decided these would be a clever thing to put on the shelf at the office and talk about share with some of my younger developers. You know the things that I grew up playing or enjoyed back in the day and they’ll get a little more use than they are sitting boxes in the basement. In doing that it got me thinking about you know growing up back in the mid 80s when I when I started programming I was 12 years old. My parents bought me an apple II GS and I have been a programmer ever since the day I got the computer so I went on eBay and I kind of wish I still had that computer and I found one and I ordered one and ultimately I had to order 2 and piecemeal a few together that worked and in doing so I went down to my basement and dug up a dusty old box of floppy disks – five and a quarter and three and a half inch disks. Popped them in and it worked. All my old programs that the blog post that you’re talking about is really me looking back at when I was 12 I was in the middle of Nebraska. And that’s a time and a place where not a lot of people had computers.

Kevin: There were no we were still using rotary phones and there was no internet in the sense that we have it today. And I as of this recording I’m a whopping 42 years of age. Some people consider that young some people consider that old.

Kevin: I’m kind of in that middle age but at 12 years old I’ve got a computer and that computer booted to a blinking cursor. It literally did nothing. It shocked me. I was excited. I was the proud new owner of a shiny new computer and I turned it on and up came a cursor, it did absolutely nothing I dug through the boxes of manuals I said it’s got to be more than this it’s got it. And I was expecting video games and all this fancy stuff to come out of it. Ultimately I had to learn to make it do make make that computer do something on my own. And I found a book that I still treasure very much back in my house. I have a book called Learning to Program in Applesoft Basic so in those days you know you’ve got computers that the availability of software, entertainment was limited. The number of other people that knew how to make them do something was limited. So I wrote a program within the first hour just reading this book just starting at the top and saying hey I must type line 10 print Hello World.

Kevin: I don’t think hello world had become a thing back then I can’t remember what I printed. When something came out I was I was hooked. I love that computer and fortunately got another one and oddly enough all my floppy disks, those original programs I wrote that day 30 years ago, still booted and were still there.

Kevin: All my old comments, all my old code in Basic, C, and Pascal and assembly language. So I spent the last month or so kind of reminiscing and going back and looking at what I learned and realizing that ever since that day my entire career and everything I’ve done has been based on that book and really growing from there.

Derek: It’s really cool. So you wrote comments when you were 12 years old. That’s impressive.

Kevin: I spent time trying to this was before you know Google and books and back then the overall surface area of technology was very small I had no peers or mentors to teach me to organize your code. It was just something that I as a young young guy decided it made my life a lot easier.

Kevin: So I evolved into it over the years obviously best practices arose and I read books and you know went to college for it and did other things but it was amazing to see in 88 and 89 me organizing a group of subroutines in a non object oriented language and trying to do it a little more clearly than I did before.

Ron: So Kevin you are really taking me back.

Ron: My first computer was a Commodore 64 and I can remember being down in the basement with my brother and sister and we would put in that game into the floppy disk and it would take, felt like it would take 10 minutes to load a game and we’d be off getting the old hot chocolate.

Ron: What do some of your new staf...