Appearance on the Mac Developer Roundtable

The latest episode of Mac Developer Roundtable has gone live and I was pleased to be invited on again (see Getting around... table from a few months ago for the first time). This episode's topic is "Getting Started With Cocoa" and is intended for people who are new to Cocoa, Apple's programming framework for Macs & the iPhone.

Joining me on the podcast were some great voices -- Danny Greg, Brent Simmons, Mitch Cohen, Colin Wheeler, and of course the host, Scotty.

I really enjoyed being on this show since only a few years ago, I was a newbie in Cocoaland and was gobbling up all of the resources I could find to teach myself how to use Cocoa. Part of what has always drawn me to the Cocoa community is all of the people who are blogging their experiences, open sourcing their code, and giving behind-the-scenes looks at what makes Mac apps tick, so it was great for me to be on a show and try to give back to the community at large and maybe inspire some new folks to keep at it and build Mac apps.

I'd also like to put in a good word for what Scotty's been building over at the Mac Developer Network. There are a number of great shows, both free and members-only, that are definitely worth checking out. Whether you are just getting up to speed or are an old hand at Cocoa and all things Mac dev, Scotty's got something for you. I really enjoy the podcasts that he puts out, ranging from the technical on to shows such as Developer Lives, which goes behind the scenes to profile the lives of Mac developers.

And speaking of developer lives, I'd be remiss if I didn't elaborate a bit about my credentials as a programmer. In the show, I started a discussion about everyone's programming backgrounds and where they started, indicating that I started programming Perl and PHP ten or twelve years ago. What I meant, I guess, was recent programming experience that led you to Cocoa. I then proceeded to get schooled with everyone else's experience, since they went all the way back to their very beginnings.

So, to fill in a bit about my own programming history, I started on a TI-99/4A in the 80s programming BASIC (Mr. Bojangles, anyone?), then moved to both Apple IIe and IBM PCjr (both also BASIC), and only much later, in college, did I get into Perl and PHP in my free time in the late 90s before turning it into a career. Early on, I spent a lot of time on things like making the Jeopardy! theme song play on my TI or typing spy games from a book into my elementary school's IIe.

I now spend most of my time in PHP and Cocoa, pretty evenly divided, and enjoy building solutions that touch on both the client- and the server-side using this experience. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in some way, I guess I always knew I'd be a programmer, as it has always been something I've been interested in. So consider that my full background -- maybe you share a similar one, or maybe Cocoa will be your first programming language. Either way, welcome.

One last note -- don't forget to check out the gag reel at the end of the show. It's pretty funny, at least for me as one of the folks involved.

So, go have a listen!