I’m a Macintosh programmer from back in the early days – well, about 1987 anyway. That’s the first time I released MacCribbage. That was my first real project programming on the Mac and it turns out that it’s the most important thing I ever did for my career. I was a Math major in college and had every intention of getting a PhD in Math and becoming a professor. Computer programming was just a hobby and I only took one semester of Computer Science. The shareware movement was huge on the Mac back then and I really enjoyed making MacCribbage and releasing updates. I even got some money every once in a while. In my second year of grad school I realized that I was not going to make it to the PhD. At that point the computer programming thing was looking like a good option. My wife and I preferred being relatively close to home so I got on AppleLink and searched for Mac programming jobs in Pennsylvania. I ended up interviewing at a startup called Compumation in State College, PA. I went there with the only evidence I had of my programming ability, a floppy with MacCribbage on it and a hard copy of the code. It was in Pascal and they asked if I knew C. Well, I figured that question would be coming so I had purchased a learning C on the Mac book the week before so I could answer yes. I was hired. It was stressful as most startups are but a fun time and we worked on a good product called Color Central. About a year-and-a-half after being hired Aldus bought Compumation and I ended up moving to Seattle. I was there when Adobe merged with Aldus and then I went on to work for some other companies. I’ll end this story by saying I’ve been back working with Adobe for the last two-and-a-half years (I just confirmed that Adobe doesn’t have a problem with bloggers saying that they work there). Anyway – I’ve been in the software business for 12 years now and it’s all due to a cribbage program! Since I moved back to the Mac after OS X came out I’ve been doing plenty of programming on it but it’s mostly been web development with PHP. Learning Cocoa, Apple’s development environment for OS X, has been on my list of things to do but learning Objective C, Cocoa’s native language, has not. I recently learned Python for the team I joined and really like it. I just started looking at PyObjC, a bridge between Objective C and Python, that allows you to make Cocoa application in Python. I’m working through the tutorials now. I don’t really have a project in mind yet – although maybe it’s time to resurrect MacCribbage and bring it into the land of OS X.