About the Author
I am Knut Haugen [Knu:t Hæugen], a software developer working in Oslo, Norway. I am programming on and off in Perl, Ruby, C#, PHP and Java and I have even had my hands on Lisp. I prefer to use a Linux environment whenever I can, but I’m forced to work on windows now and again. Ooh, and I recently got a mac (shiny!) and I love it. Other interests in the field of software development includes methodologies like almost everything that falls within the agile sphere, and scrum and lean/kanban in particular. I’m also partial to TDD/BDD/DDD techniques but I still consider myself in the learning stage at this.
I got started with computers one summer vacation when I was around 14 or so, when my uncle (who got started with computers back in the 70s) had me tag along when he programmed a horse-betting game on a casio calculator in BASIC. And then I generally didn’t catch on besides playing Doom and 3D Wolfenstein on my dads 386. I was more into photography and sports and worked as a freelance photographer from the age of 15 to 20. I applied for photojournalist school, but didn’t get in. My second choice was computer science and I ended up there. I bought my first own computer before starting the course and the night before I moved my uncle (yes the same uncle) came by with a stack of cds and said “install these first then windows”). The cd’s where FreeBSD 2.2.6 and I can’t think of a deeper pool to jump into when fairly new to computers.
My first programing language was VB5 as that was the language the course “introduction to programming” was taught in. I luckily moved on to Java (eh, not so lucky after all, but better than VB) and then Perl while in school and got stuck mostly doing Perl for the first seven years of my career as a consultant. Nowadays it’s mostly Ruby, C# and PHP and I can see a java project on the horizon. If I can choose freely I would prefer working in Perl (which I still know best) or Ruby. In fact any dynamic language is better than a statically typed one.
Some more links:
http://twitter.com/knuthaug
http://github.com/knuthaug
http://no.linkedin.com/in/knuthaugen
http://www.flickr.com/photos/megafon/