TrueJournals

My programming career really started out in sixth-grade, when a friend asked me to make an AIM subprofile website for him.  AIMJournals was born a couple weeks later, and the site was (in my eyes) largely successful.  At its peak, there were over 500 members.  Not bad for a sixth-grader.

However, my friend soon became greedy, and only wanted to sell AIMJournals.  He offered me a cut of the profit, but I had grown attached to the site, and wanted to keep it in my posession.  It was my frist big PHP and MySQL programming job, and I was proud of it.  Eventually, he showed me a letter he had “recieved,” which appeard to be from AOL’s legal department, saying that our use of AIM was infringing on their copyright, and we should rename the site, so that they aren’t associated with us.

I’ll never know if that letter was real or not.  Regardless, I worked with a couple others to move the site to truejournals.com, and attempt to rename it and redo it.  However, the aimjournals site never really redirected to truejournals, so the site died for the most part.  I had lost interest with the project, as I moved into high school, and my life became busier.  Eventually, I decided to shut down the old TrueJournals, and take the domain name for my personal use.

I took AP Computer Science in high school, which introduced me to Java, a language which I despise.  I have found it to be slow, and generally just not worth the effort.  I then became active working on the tech team at my church.  We use the open-source program OpenSong, but there were a few changes that we wanted to make to how the application worked, so I was asked to learn REALbasic.  I have become fairly fluent in REALbasic, and have made multiple modifications to OpenSong, and even written a few personal-use programs.

Then, I bought a Nokia Internet Tablet.  I feel in love with it from day one, and wanted to start programming for it.  I was lost with where to start, until someone requested a simple application: a Weight Watchers point calculator.  Then, I needed a language.  I had heard that python was easy, so I decided to use that.  Since then, I have also written a tip calculator, remote desktop frontend, and system file editor for the Nokia Internet Tablets.

Which brings us to today.  It’s been a while since I have done any major coding in PHP, but I still remember most of what I’ve learned over the years.  I tinker with REALbasic every now and then, but am really focused on Python development.  I am currently 18, freshman at Valparaiso University, majoring in Computer Engineering.

Disclaimer: the views and opinions expressed on this blog are that of myself, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Valparaiso University, and so on, and such forth.