Last Updated on January 9, 2021 by Don Espe

I’ve been programming in one way or another since the mid 1980’s. In those years, I have never stopped learning new things. Heck, even after I had some minor success with iOS apps, I continued to read websites and buy books to continue to grow my knowledge.

I started with an Apple IIe back in the ’80s and moved up at an Apple IIgs around 1986 and into the mid 1990’s. Yes, I kept that Apple IIgs through all of those years. In fact, it put away currently in a closet a few feet from where I’m writing this. But, I didn’t stop learning. I had dozens of books and probably at least 100 magazines devoted to that computer. I mainly used Applesoft BASIC on that computer along with a bit of assembly language. I also started to pick up a bit with Macs at school. When I stepped into college in the early 1990’s I started to work with MSDOS and Windows a bit. I also started to expand my programming languages into Pascal and Fortran and C. Pascal was the main language used in school, but C would be the most useful for my later endeavours.

After college I ended up doing retail work and the programming drifted to the background. But, eventually it came back once programming for iPhones became a thing. That seemed like the perfect opportunity that I could finally write my own software and distribute it. I bought a book or two and started the process of learning new things, yet again. This time the language was Objective-C. I managed to create several apps using that language, though it never felt fully comfortable to me. The C side of it made sense, and even some of the object oriented aspects but as a whole it never fully clicked.

Then, Apple introduced Swift. I fell for Swift quickly. I again started picking up and reading through books and websites as I gained confidence in Swift. It was a bit of a curve because the language was still being developed and would undergo major changes a couple of times a year at least. It took a lot more research to stay on top of things, but I kept developing apps using the language. I liked the language enough that I rewrote many of my early apps to be exclusively in Swift instead of Objective-C.

Over the last year, I started to look into a couple of new languages – Kotlin and Python. They both are widely used in areas that I would like to explore more. One of them being Android programming. I would like more of my apps to be available to Android systems – especially since my current phone in an Android phone.

That’s a brief rundown of my programming growth. I didn’t go into much detail along the way, but it does give a good overview of my journey. Over time, I plan to delve more into various aspects, but for now I hope you enjoyed a taste of how I got here.