Welcome to our continuing series of CodeProject interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves. In this installment we talk to Sam Nguyen, developer of TextDrop, an online editor for Dropbox.
Who are you?
My name is Sam Nguyen, I live and work in Orange County, CA. I’m currently employed by Panasonic Avionics Corporation where I work on web systems for the in-flight entertainment industry.
What do you do?
If you’ve ever watched a movie on an airplane over WiFi, I might have built some of that software in my day job. Others may know me as the developer of TextDrop, an online editor for Dropbox that I build on the side.
What is your development environment?
I live by my MacBook Air 13", which is plenty of power and usually plenty of pixels for what I do. I typically find myself switching between iTerm2 and Sublime Text 2 most of the day.
On the backend I lean toward Node.js and Google Go.
I have a love/hate relationship with Haskell. I’ve tried learning it about 6 times, but still have yet to reach monad enlightenment.
What is your coding pet peeve?
This is one reason I love Google Go. A lot of those decisions are made for you by ‘go fmt’. The Go plugin for Sublime Text 2 formats your code every time you save. I wish every language did this.
How did you get started programming?
There is a gap of about 10 years between using my first computer and my first time programming.
When I was about 4 my dad brought home a new Apple IIc one day with games like StickyBear Typing and Moon Patrol.
I started messing around with in HTML in high school, and learned C++ in college during my first course in data structures.
I glean a lot of architecture, programming and business knowledge from Hacker News. I also like to read RFCs on internet protocols because I’m a nerd (TCP, HTTP, IRC, etc).
What advice would you offer to an up-and-coming programmer?
Look around you for problems that you can solve with software, and solve them.
