Murad Khan

I've been a hobbyist programmer since I was 20. I wasn't writing anything amazing back then but I had started writing and soon found it was absorbing most of my time. Since I never really stopped, that gives me 14 years "programming experience" and counting.

At first I was into writing computer games. Later people asked me to write programs for them, and sometimes I even got paid. From this I learned that software is always for something. Programs are not self contained worlds of their own. People expect things out of a program that have more to do with Japanese or Geophysics or Engineering (or whatever they've got in mind) than with how a computer works. I had to learn something about all those domains in order to write programs for them.

At university it didn't take long before I was a tutor, and that's where I found I enjoy teaching, and especially enjoy teaching programming.

While I was at university I got my first "real" job, writing Visual C++ code for a financial database company. In terms of design and theory it was lightweight stuff. But in terms of working with others on a large project I was being thrown in the deep end! They had gigabytes of source code, growing cancerously through the efforts of a dozen developers of wildly differing skill levels.

In spite of my programming skills being well above average there, I learned to settle for being a junior programmer, a little fish in a large pond.

Skipping along a few more jobs and a lot more years, today I am a senior developer in a small research group—a big fish in a little pond. I've had to teach my co-workers a lot about professional programming, because most of them haven't been in industry to get that taste of what large code bases and diverse skill levels do to programs if you aren't using those "professional" skills to keep everyone pointed in the same direction.

There's quite a gap between "being able to program" and being a "professional programmer." It took me 8 years to go from beginner to hotshot programmer, then another 6 years to go from hotshot to professional—and I'm still learning.