Programming and Inclination to Open Source

I started programming as a child in 1989, with no formal computer science education. Internet had not yet arrived for public in India and thus most of the programming knowledge came in from various books. Luckily being in Roorkee, a small-town with the great British-era Thomson College of Engineering, had access to their library with books plenty. FTP based internet came into reach and the beginning to download the ZIP files spread across various FTP servers and Bulletin Boards.

Some of the books I have memories of going over again and again include:

Using Norton Commander and Norton Editor was my first hand experience of how professional software could be written. As a kid, it was so so magical.

My journey with programming involved writing tools and utilities to aid my studies and engineering. Graduating in Civil Engineering, summa-cum-laude, we had no regular or elective courses to programming, but the fascination had just deepened. Before my studies completed, I was able to automate AutoCAD for generating surveying topology sheets or glue Java code to run multiple iterations for building frame design. It saved a lot of time and also helped fetch the best project medals at the end of the course.

Early professional years were all about learning how to build production grade software and techniques used to debug+fix bugs coming from the field. During these years one thing that echoed often was the redundant boiler plate code we were churning out. Scratching the own itch led to my very first open-source project Jerry, hosted on SourceForge to Google Code and finally found its own shade in Github.

Github influenced my contributions to open-source, accelarating it up. And over the last few years, the number of some-what usable ideas and the ones in infancy have grown to 100+, all safely in-shade in my Github repository.

Feel free to connect for any ideas, or if you would like to join-in to lend a helping hand.

Keep Walking!