I was called out by Dan Rigsby to do this, so here she goes:

1. How old were you when you started programming?

   I believe I was 12 or 13.

2. How did you get started in programming?

   I remember learning some BASIC in school in either 6th or 7th grade. Ya know, you draw a blocky gun and make it fire a one pixel bullet across the screen. I remember that being pretty fun. Also, right around the same time I started playing with QBASIC at home.

3. What was your first language?

   BASIC/QBASIC

4. What was the first real program you wrote?

   Not counting school, the first real program I wrote was a spaghetti code version (chock full of GOTO’s) of a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

5. What languages have you used since you started programming?

   BASIC, QBASIC, C, C++, MIPS Assembly Language, VB, ADA, Java, C#, ASP.NET, Javascript

6. What was your first professional programming gig?

   I was a lab TA for the CS101 Java course at Purdue, so that was my first job involving programming, but my first job actually programming was at Raytheon. I worked there for six years before coming to Interactive Intelligence in 2006. At Raytheon, I worked on various project for the Army and Navy involving mortar aiming applications, handheld applications, route planning applications for helicopters and many other things. If I tell you anymore I’d have to kill you.

7. If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

   Definitely. Whenever I get asked what my dream job would be I always reply that it would be doing what I’m doing now (programming) or touring in a band. I deeply enjoy them both. But I must admit that programming for myself and writing whatever I want to write at the time would definitely be better than the maintenance programming I sometimes still have to do.

8. If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

   Don’t waste time. I can think of numerous times in college and after college that I just screwed around and did other things when I could have been honing my skills more and keeping myself up to date. I’m trying to get myself back up to date now and it would have been easier if I had just spent the time after college to do so.

9. What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?

   I love programming for fun. Right now, my extracurricular programming activity is writing Bitter a Twitter/social networking client. In my spare time, I’ve also written a chat program, an email application, an account/password manager, an RSS aggregator and several Pocket PC applications including a file explorer, an RSS aggregator, a network scanner, and various other tools. I just find it a great way to learn and to me it’s extremely fun.

10. Who are you calling out?

    I want to call some fellow bloggers and non-bloggers alike (to see if they’ll actually start):

    • Aaron Lerch
    • Scott Bauer
    • Jeff Moser
    • Kyle Brown
    • Jake Robinson
    • Evan Byl
    • Brian McGreer
    • Todd Zerbe

Should you ever allow a "Miscellaneous" category or section or tab or page in your application? When dividing your data up into different sections, do you always have a place for everything or do you have a place for most things and then everything else goes into the catch all "Miscellaneous" section?

Some applications use "Configuration" or "Options" to try and solve this problem. Visual Studio 2008 uses a "General" section:

"General" is not quite miscellaneous, but almost. These options don’t really seem to fit in the other subcategories of "Edit and Continue", "Just In Time", "Native", or "Symbols". So that at least seems to mean that they need their own section.

Firefox uses the same pattern in their Advanced section:

These options are at least grouped into sections, but they still don’t seem to fit into any of the other categories.

Outlook 2007 on the other hand has an "Other" tab:

This may as well have been called "General" as well. There’s no rhyme or reason as far as I can tell for the sections inside of "Other".  Looks like another case of "Miscellaneous" to me.

In the fields of Information Architecture and Usability, a method known as card sorting is used to have potential users sort terms and labels according to how they would logically group them, in whatever order that might be.

In many cases, the users have a leftover category that they might simply label "Miscellaneous". Is this ok or is this just another usability issue to deal with and redesign later? Should "miscellaneous" never ever be allowed? Does inclusion of a miscellaneous category mean that your data isn’t organized in a intuitive way? Or will inclusion of a miscellaneous category just lead to users hunting around all the similarly titled sections until they finally check miscellaneous?

Or is that just too much of a Platonic ideal? Are there times where some fields simply don’t fit anywhere else? At some point do we need to throw up our hands and allow the wave of meaningless titles and labels flow?

Aaron Lerch recently talked about not being able to keep up with new design technologies and programming techniques and everything else new that comes out each day. I definitely know what he’s talking about since I often feel that I need to use every free moment I have to read some technical book or blog post or listen to a podcast. Basically, I can’t waste any time so that I don’t fall any further behind.

But at the same time, is trying to learn everything just counterproductive? Will it make us all jack of all trades and master of none? Will it allow me to be able to shabbily program in just about any language from Javascript to C to F#, but not produce anything extremely cool like Google Earth or PageFlakes or a cool new IDS or the next great UI through Wii hacking?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m as guilty as anyone of this. I write about security, UI, Vista and programming all in the same blog. In the past couple weeks, I’ve been doing encryption schemes in Javascript and C#, I’ve looked at usability researching and I’ve been reading up on UML. Is that making me a more well rounded developer or just diluting my brain with non-important things?

What do you think? and do? Are you a master of all things C#? Do you only subscribe to .NET blogs? Or do you read Boing Boing and MSNBC and ASP.NET blogs and SecurityFocus?