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Wow! This is cool. The computers in Jurassic Park is what got me into programming when I was young. I saw their 3D weather overlay when the storm was approachi

by malux85 13y ago

Wow! This is cool. The computers in Jurassic Park is what got me into programming when I was young. I saw their 3D weather overlay when the storm was approaching and thought "THAT IS IT!". I was 8 years old at the time. I was determined to learn and create that system - I started learning C, so that I could open and close files. I learnt OpenGL so that I could create the 3D scene. I learnt socket programming so that I could download weather images from the NOAA. It took me until I was 15 (I was totally self taught and it took me a while before I could learn all of the vector / matrix math myself) but I ended up building it! I made a program in C that downloaded the weather jpg, cleaned it up (removed noise, removed the NOAA logo, smoothed out the clouds) then generated a heightmap in OpenGL, and made a fly-over. I wish I still had the code, it's sitting on my old computer at the Farm in New Zealand :<

dorfuss 13y ago
I'd love to see that! :)
- malux85 13y ago
  me too, I want it back now! ... I was just remembering what a PITA it was programming when I was younger - no internet at home meant I had to read the code of similar programs to try and figure out how to do things. Every day I'd come home with a box of floppy disks full of open source programs to read, and satellite jpgs downloaded from the noaa website. later on I got internet access and that's when I hooked it up live ... good old NZ Farm internet : 0.5kb/s because our electric fences caused so much electrical interference with the phone lines ....
  - brador 13y ago
    Shoulda turned off the fences...
    - AtmaScout 13y ago
      Not the raptor fences of course.
  - aunty_helen 13y ago
    That moment you first experienced one of your townie friend's xtra jetstream...
NAFV_P 13y ago
> The computers in Jurassic Park is what got me into programming when I was young. I saw their 3D weather overlay when the storm was approaching and thought "THAT IS IT!". I was 8 years old at the time. I'm guessing you would be around 28-30 years old, so I'm a couple of years or more older ... but I started learning C when I was 31, currently I'm interested in stuff like parsers and data structures (I really should look at sockets soon). Perhaps I'm just too old to hack. > I wish I still had the code, it's sitting on my old computer at the Farm in New Zealand :< I bet a fair few people on HN would be interested in it as well, it sounds quite hardcore.
- doorhammer 13y ago
  Warning: anecdotes and unsubstantiated speculation ahead Did you do any programming at all before 31? I don't think you're ever too old to do anything, personally. I was 26 (which isn't terribly old, admittedly, but definitely past the little kid age) when I talked to a friend who was a professional programmer and decided "huh, I like computers and solving problems. I'm going to do that." I hadn't programmed before then, though I was computer savvy, I guess. I also have a degree in sociology, heh. Took me about four years, but now I have a corporate job doing full stack .net work in C#/MVC, I've done side projects in ruby, and I do some C, Haskell, and python on the side. I'm also working my way through The Algorithm Design manual and have Concrete Mathematics to work through later on. I always got really discouraged because I constantly see and hear about people who started programming when they were five, or eight, or something like that, and I'd think "no way could I get into it that deeply, starting so late" but that's just totally untrue. I'm finally at a point where I think "given the desire and time, I can learn whatever comp sci topic I want," so I get discouraged less. I think part of it has to do with notions of talent, and natural abilities. When I was a kid, I took for granted that something would be hard until I learned it. I don't remember learning most of the basic skills I have, so I forget that things can be difficult starting out. Every topic I've started learning and stuck with in programming has pretty fully integrated itself into the core of how I think about the topic. One for-example would be immutable data structures as they're implemented in Clojure, or functional programming in general. Anyway, that's a rambling tl:dr for: stick with it. You're never too old. You just have to try that much harder to catch up initially, but if you can teach yourself to keep learning now, you've got an extra skill a lot of people don't have, which is learning how to learn as an adult. I think it's the most valuable skill I have right now. (ps I'm making a lot of assumptions in this post; sorry if any of them are way off base)
bch 13y ago
No, _your story_ is cool. Its amazing how dogged a kid with a vision can be. This sort of attitude and environment needs to be passed on to future programmers, and preserved in the current ones. Kudos.
- d34b4c29 13y ago
  I was just mad at how fat those kids started eating the gelatin while being chased by velociraptor everywhere. Every aspect of that movie is NULL. Except for Jeff Goldblum
d34b4c29 13y ago
Your argument is invalid, I learned how to code earlier with 00 10 20 30 40 50 and those kiddos hello world laptops were really early.
yammada 13y ago
Nice! I was lucky enough to have the pleasure of working with a few of the smart folks who were responsible for those weather visualizations. They were created by a little known startup in Minneapolis, Minnesota called EarthWatch Communications. At the time they were creating 3D displays of weather data long before such visualizations were commonplace on every TV weather forecast.
talkingquickly 13y ago
that's an awesome story. Currently compiling a blog post series of interviews with people who have interesting stories about how they learned to code, would be great to interview you! If you're interested my emails ben at talkingquickly co uk

by malux85 13y ago

dorfuss 13y ago

I'd love to see that! :)

malux85 13y ago
me too, I want it back now! ... I was just remembering what a PITA it was programming when I was younger - no internet at home meant I had to read the code of similar programs to try and figure out how to do things. Every day I'd come home with a box of floppy disks full of open source programs to read, and satellite jpgs downloaded from the noaa website. later on I got internet access and that's when I hooked it up live ... good old NZ Farm internet : 0.5kb/s because our electric fences caused so much electrical interference with the phone lines ....
- brador 13y ago
  Shoulda turned off the fences...
  - AtmaScout 13y ago
    Not the raptor fences of course.
- aunty_helen 13y ago
  That moment you first experienced one of your townie friend's xtra jetstream...

NAFV_P 13y ago

> The computers in Jurassic Park is what got me into programming when I was young. I saw their 3D weather overlay when the storm was approaching and thought "THAT IS IT!". I was 8 years old at the time. I'm guessing you would be around 28-30 years old, so I'm a couple of years or more older ... but I started learning C when I was 31, currently I'm interested in stuff like parsers and data structures (I really should look at sockets soon). Perhaps I'm just too old to hack. > I wish I still had the code, it's sitting on my old computer at the Farm in New Zealand :< I bet a fair few people on HN would be interested in it as well, it sounds quite hardcore.

doorhammer 13y ago
Warning: anecdotes and unsubstantiated speculation ahead Did you do any programming at all before 31? I don't think you're ever too old to do anything, personally. I was 26 (which isn't terribly old, admittedly, but definitely past the little kid age) when I talked to a friend who was a professional programmer and decided "huh, I like computers and solving problems. I'm going to do that." I hadn't programmed before then, though I was computer savvy, I guess. I also have a degree in sociology, heh. Took me about four years, but now I have a corporate job doing full stack .net work in C#/MVC, I've done side projects in ruby, and I do some C, Haskell, and python on the side. I'm also working my way through The Algorithm Design manual and have Concrete Mathematics to work through later on. I always got really discouraged because I constantly see and hear about people who started programming when they were five, or eight, or something like that, and I'd think "no way could I get into it that deeply, starting so late" but that's just totally untrue. I'm finally at a point where I think "given the desire and time, I can learn whatever comp sci topic I want," so I get discouraged less. I think part of it has to do with notions of talent, and natural abilities. When I was a kid, I took for granted that something would be hard until I learned it. I don't remember learning most of the basic skills I have, so I forget that things can be difficult starting out. Every topic I've started learning and stuck with in programming has pretty fully integrated itself into the core of how I think about the topic. One for-example would be immutable data structures as they're implemented in Clojure, or functional programming in general. Anyway, that's a rambling tl:dr for: stick with it. You're never too old. You just have to try that much harder to catch up initially, but if you can teach yourself to keep learning now, you've got an extra skill a lot of people don't have, which is learning how to learn as an adult. I think it's the most valuable skill I have right now. (ps I'm making a lot of assumptions in this post; sorry if any of them are way off base)

bch 13y ago

No, _your story_ is cool. Its amazing how dogged a kid with a vision can be. This sort of attitude and environment needs to be passed on to future programmers, and preserved in the current ones. Kudos.

d34b4c29 13y ago
I was just mad at how fat those kids started eating the gelatin while being chased by velociraptor everywhere. Every aspect of that movie is NULL. Except for Jeff Goldblum

d34b4c29 13y ago

Your argument is invalid, I learned how to code earlier with 00 10 20 30 40 50 and those kiddos hello world laptops were really early.

yammada 13y ago

Nice! I was lucky enough to have the pleasure of working with a few of the smart folks who were responsible for those weather visualizations. They were created by a little known startup in Minneapolis, Minnesota called EarthWatch Communications. At the time they were creating 3D displays of weather data long before such visualizations were commonplace on every TV weather forecast.

talkingquickly 13y ago

that's an awesome story. Currently compiling a blog post series of interviews with people who have interesting stories about how they learned to code, would be great to interview you! If you're interested my emails ben at talkingquickly co uk