He basically just let us play with it whenever he wasn’t doing drafting or spreadsheets. I figured out a little bit of BASIC and a little bit of Logo, and King’s Quest I and Jumpman, and got really into making computers do things. I was really fascinated with the idea of providing a series of commands that made something happen. Choices were limited back then or functionality was limited, but soon after you could program Lego with Logo and make robots and things, and that’s where it all started. Instantly, as soon as I had my fingers on a keyboard, this kind of obsession with making computers do cool things instantly began.Īlexis: I guess it’s a little misleading for me to start by asking you that question since you were also very firmly in the design side of things, especially early on, right?īrett: See, that’s a part of the story. All through high school I ran a BBS and I spent a lot of time on Gopher and just working around the Web and Linux and having fun. I’m sorry, not the Web – the Internet, because the Web wasn’t really in existence until my later years of high school, and that’s when I got into building web pages. It was the dawn of the web and things were not pretty at the time and that led me wanting to make prettier web pages and studying CSS more deeply. I went to school originally for Comp Sci after high school. In my second year, I withdrew from Calc2 and that was a required class. I just realized in that moment that I probably wasn’t going to get a computer science degree, so I went to art school. Just quit and go to art school and I studied interactive multimedia there and got heavily into the design side but never stopped coding-even my interactive design projects were all based on Director. I don’t know if anyone remembers Director but that used to be Macromedia and then became Adobe. Anyway, got into that and then after college I went more into design, started a design studio after having a job as an art director that I hated. Then as the web developed, so did the tie between design and code-as someone who was working pretty much singlehandedly on everything, I had to get more into code again. Eventually I decided that design critics are too annoying because you’d get all these clients that said things like “Hmm, I don’t know what it is but I don’t like it.”īrett: That would just drive me nuts. You know? They wouldn’t trust any decision that you made, but they had all these completely subjective criticism, and I just started coding. Do you want the rest of the story now?īrett: While I was running the design studio, I started writing an app called MoodBlast and you could pop it out with a hot key and it would update nine different social services with one string. It had all these like syntax, like features-you could add Bang weather and insert the current temperature. It got out of hand like most of the stuff I do, but I was just doing it for fun. It started in AppleScript and morphed into Objective-C.ĭavid Chartier over at The Unofficial Apple weblog at that time-he picked up on it and he loved it. That started getting me a lot of traffic and it was the beginning of actually seriously programming anything other than scripts and webpages.Īlexis: Now let’s go back to the whole I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it kind of thing.
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