Chapter 3 - Who am I?

This is the typical rah-rah, ain’t I great chapter. It’s not going to teach you a single thing about Laravel. The smartest move you could make right now is to skip to the next chapter.

Hello. My name is Chuck Heintzelman and I write computer programs.

(That felt like I was in front a support group. I hope nobody said “Hi Chuck.”)

Seriously. I’ve written programs since that day in 9^th grade when I stayed home “sick” from school with a borrowed BASIC Language Reference manual and wrote out on paper a game that was like Asteroids except instead of asteroids flying at you it was other ships firing long white blocks of death at you.

After long hours of debugging and waiting for the TRS-80 to load/save my program to it’s “mass storage” (a cassette tape), the game finally worked. This was 33 years ago. Back in the day of computer dinosaurs, large ferocious beasts filling climate-controlled rooms. No, I’ve never actually used punched cards, but have seen them in use.

Since then I’ve written programs in Fortran, COBOL (yeah, I know), Assembly Language, Basic, C, C++, C#, Java, Pascal, Perl, Javascript, and PHP. I’ve tinkered with many, many other languages, but have not written programs that people actually used.

I’ve created systems for Fortune 500 companies, as well as small Mom-and-Pop stores. Everything from mail order systems running in Xenix to web applications running in PHP. I’ve started several companies before the days of the Internet (not before the real beginning of the Internet, just before the excitement starting in the mid-90s), and a few dot coms since then. And through it all I’ve did what I loved to do–write computer programs.

Whew! Okay, enough about how great I am.

Here’s my point Throughout my career I’ve never felt the need to create a book about programming until now. The sole reason I’m writing this is because of Laravel.