What do you do?

I thought I'd ask/answer this question because what I do day to day actually has nothing to do with programming or design. I picked up Flash and ActionScript in high school as a hobby and have continued dabbling with it over the years. I'm currently acquiring a BSc majoring in biology for use as a pre-medical degree and work on a ranch in the off-time from school.

What is currently your favourite project/piece of work and why?

Programming wise? I've done a lot of pretty neat (at least I think so) experiments over the years. Of the about 1000 ideas I've thought of I've only completed a handful; the rest are either half-finished and sitting on my computer wasting space or are in the back of my mind. Although none of them are exactly mind-bogglingly awesome, a few of these projects stand out as milestones for me in my programming life:

1. Swirling Line Thing
2. Connected Motion
3. Collecting Snow
4. Equation Parser

The equation parser is by far my favourite and since then I have actually changed the code quite considerably and introduced a bunch of new features. I would like to someday complete it and use it to make a graphing application but at the same time the idea of doing that sounds incredibly boring to me right now so it will probably sit for a while.

Work wise? I recently taught myself how to inject antibiotics and other drugs directly into the jugular vein of calves which I think is pretty cool.

School wise? Last semester I transformed E. coli bacteria to make them resistant to ampicillin as well as fluorescent under UV light using a plasmid called pGLO. Useful? No. Awesome? Yes. I heard someone made a rabbit that glows using this same DNA. Why not?!

What is your design or development tool of choice? What would you change to improve it?

Well currently I mostly use my brain to compile all of the code I write since it is all to help answer questions on these forums:

( source - wikipedia )

 Unfortunately its error checking isn’t anything to be proud of. My favourite development tool of all time is definitely Flash since it is so easy to write code and compile all in the same IDE. I love ActionScript because it’s very easy to go from a few lines of code to a cool application in a short amount of time. That’s not to say it isn’t a very powerful language though and it continues to make strides forward.

Unfortunately my current version of Flash is 8 so whenever I need to compile AS3 code I use the free compiler from Adobe and FlashDevelop. I really enjoy FlashDevelop’s code completion but for ease of use Flash always has a place for me. Plus I hear its code completion has improved greatly since Flash 8.

What makes you motivated to wake up daily and go to work?

I enjoy my job most of the time but the prospect of money is also a big motivator.

How fast can you eat lunch while typing?

I still hunt and peck and, despite the fact that I’m incredibly fast, being forced to shove food in my mouth with one hand effectively cuts my typing speed in half.

Do you believe a formal education is beneficial for the type of work that you do?

Definitely not, it’s all about experience or being part of the family. Fortunately I meet both qualifications.

If you had to be a dinosaur, which one would you want to be?

The one that kills Tyrannosaurus Rex...

( Godzilla...maybe? )

I hope you all enjoyed this series of questions and answers, and thanks to TheCanadian for answering them. To ask more follow-up questions, post them in the Interview - TheCanadian forum thread.

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