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Articles
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The Dean of Duke Dollars
(June 2000)
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Having cut his own programming teeth at the JDC site, Horwath (better known as "xhunterx" to his online colleagues) feels an altruistic allegiance to answering posts. But he also sees the process as an ongoing learning experience - serving to sharpen and deepen his own understanding of the topics in question.
"A lot of my early questions were really pretty simple," he says. "I'd ask--'How do you downcast, or how do you get a result set from the server to an applet if you have an applet front end?'" Little by little, though, he found himself answering as many questions as he was asking. "By the time I started answering questions," he says, "it became really obvious that I was learning as much as anyone else by researching and responding. I'd set out to explain why it's not easy to freeze a column in the middle of a JTable, or how such and such a programming model works, and find myself blossoming as a programmer in the process. It undoubtedly accelerated my own evolution--more than almost anything else I could imagine."
Horwath is a conceptual holdover from the wild and wooly early days of software development, when programmers tended to hail from all over the academic map, and where their entry into the coding world often tended to be a fascinating tale of fate and serendipity. In Horwath's case, he holds
"By the time I started answering questions," he says, "it became really obvious that I was learning as much as anyone else by researching and responding." |
But then fate struck. The only paid programmer on the project decided to retire. "We had two databases full of primate morphological statistics," he reports, "heights, weights, blood parameters, etc. We had some Visual Basic front ends to them. It was really pretty elementary stuff functionally--hard coded, with flat files, and fairly simplistic Microsoft Access database tables."
Horwath had dabbled with programming as a pre-teen. "I'd programmed back in the days of the Apple IIC and IIE," he says. "I used to be one of those geeks who would come home from junior high and do nothing but." That background, combined with a lull in his research work, prompted him to take a look at the lab's software systems. "It really just fell to whoever was willing to pick it up," he says. "But I found that with my background, I could pick up the vocabulary pretty quickly, and wasn't thrown by the syntax."
From there, Horwath tackled other programs written in a variant of Turbo Pascal, used to control hardware employed in the lab's research. "We used operant boxes," he says, "with a red light, a green light - where the animal would hit a lever and then get a treat. We needed these programs to set the light patterns, and then to gather the statistics."
It wasn't long before Horwath found that the coding bug had once again bitten him. "I saw that I had an aptitude for it, and I definitely had an interest in it," he says. With some paid coding experience under his belt, he started searching out greener and more expansive development pastures,
"People were just so incredibly open--giving much better answers than you'd expect from a normal newsgroup." |
While at Computer Associates, Horwath found himself doing Web development for a telecommunications client. "It was a lot of front-end work," he says, "using HTML and Active Server Pages." This was toward the end of 1998. At that time, one of his managers suggested that he investigate the Java programming language--to see what it was all about, what sort of future the company might have with it, and where it might fit into their development work. "It was just prior to the release of the JavaTM 1.2 platform," says Horwath. "There was a lot of excitement around that--the new graphics, the Swing library, etc."
And once again, Horwath proved to be someone who could pick up new technology on the fly. "This wasn't long after I'd started programming, period," he says. "But I think they saw me as sort of a blank canvas, someone who could pick up things fairly easily." Fortunately, he soon discovered the JDC site as a developer resource. "People were just so incredibly open--giving much better answers than you'd expect from a normal newsgroup," he says. "I'd ask a question, and get a four or five paragraph response--often addressing an issue before I'd even raised it. It was obvious that the people who hung out at the site were best of breed."
Horwath has high marks for other aspects of the JDC site as well. "You can really transform yourself into a professional programmer with just the tools available on the site," he says. And he sees his own professional evolution as an equal testament to the power and ease of use of the Java programming language itself. "It's hard for me to imagine having had a similar experience with C++," he says, "where I could sit down, explore the language, find out the plusses and minuses, and in six months be, not only a competent programmer, but a professional programmer."
While he has authored over 1500 postings to JDC forums in the past year, Horwath estimates that he has posted well over 1600 times since first discovering the site. Ironically, to this day, he only knows many of his JDC colleagues by their online handles. But thanks to winning the most Duke Dollars this year, Horwath was awarded a complimentary pass to JavaOne 2000--where he was able to meet up face to face with some of his long-time online contacts.
The future holds ever-new challenges for Horwath. Seeking a more cutting-edge and Java-centric development environment, he will soon be leaving Computer Associates. And while he began with
"You can really transform yourself into a professional programmer with just the tools available on the site." |
Meanwhile, once a researcher, always a researcher... "I would love to get into Java 3DTM," says Horwath, "to do scientific imaging, and the kinds of things I used to do at the NIH. Armed with these new weapons, using Java technology, particularly compared to what we were trying to do with Visual Basic and flat files," he adds, "we could kick the crap out of it!"
And as far as Horwath is concerned, this may be only the beginning. With the looming explosion of Java technology in the hand-held and small device realms, using the JavaTM 2 Platform Micro Edition (J2ME), he envisions Java Virtual Machines running on vast arrays of small and embedded medical devices--from artificial hearts to mechanical limbs. "If I could pick a dream job ten years down the line," he says, "it would be working on the cutting edge of figuring out how Java technology can be embedded in small medical devices - controlling artificial hearts, dialysis machines, or maybe even monitoring cardiac enzymes in real time, detecting conditions before they become a problem."
...And meanwhile, still true to his English Lit. major roots, whenever he finds the time, he's also hard at work on his novel!
Steven Meloan, frequent contributor to the JDC and java.sun.com, is a writer, journalist, and former software developer. He has covered the Web and the Internet for such publications as Wired, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and the San Francisco Examiner. He has also written for American Cybercast's award winning Web Episodic, "The Pyramid."