System Terminal

It has been a VERY long time since I did any serious programming. Actually, if I want to be brutally honest with myself, I’ve never been a serious programmer, at least not like the people I’ve known from High School, University, and from my work life. I’ve had the pleasure of working with a rather large pool of extremely talented programmers in my lifetime.

My programing experience has always been as part of a team. My role in the team dynamic was never as a core programmer; I was usually the guy that took the first-pass code and corrected things: algorithm problems, coding bugs, etc.

Now, with System Terminal, I don’t have a team to rely on. Challenging? Yes. Opportunity? Absolutely!

Starting Simple

So, my first project to get back into programming will be a web-based, dungeon-crawl MMO in PHP and JavaScript. Wait … what?

As you might guess, I’m terrible at starting simple. I want to do something cool. Also, I want to finish that cool thing right now. Patience is certainly not my greatest virtue. What I really need to do is slow down and build up to the large projects. So, I’m going to start at the basics and learn about the following web techs as if I’m a beginner:

• HTML


• CSS


• JavaScript


• PHP

Making it Fun

I’ve always wanted to make games. This seems like the perfect opportunity to do so. I just have to scale my expectations. Instead of massive 3D graphics and realistic physics modeling, I’ll be starting with text, PNG images, and no real-time interaction (yet). Forget multiplayer for now, too.

Alright, enough ranting. Next post I will start posting about the technical stuff: HTML and CSS!

That’s right, I’m going to start blogging. No pre-conceived notions about becoming popular, though. There are so many blogs out there, many of them written by talented writers with an established audience already. Competing for attention would be like shouting in a hurricane, I think.

Who am I?

My name is Marc Reside. I work for a large communications company supporting software. While I graduated with a Computer Science degree, my job does not require much in the way of programming, beyond being able to read and understand existing legacy code.

I used to be all about programming. It was a hobby that I pursued with great enthusiasm. Somewhere along the way I became disillusioned, and that saddens me. The urge to “get back in the saddle” has been growing for the past few years, and I’ve taken a few tentative steps towards updating my skills for a more modern world.

What’s this all about?

I need a place to put my thoughts down about programming, and to inspire me to continue to improve. I have all these great and interesting ideas floating around in my head, but I have no idea if any of them are good, or even achievable.

I’m also notoriously bad at writing things down. I don’t intend to be writing to my blog every day, but I do want to keep it going. This will (in theory) force me to write more down.

Lastly, it would be nice to build a website that I can point people to, and say “I made that.” I plan on putting more together than just this blog, but the blog itself will be my communication outlet. When I add something to the site that I want people to check out, I’ll post about it.

That’s about it for introductions! Questions? Feel free to email me about anything: mreside-at-systemterminal.com