The Competitive Developer

An airhacks.fm conversation with Thomas Wuerthinger (@thomaswue) about:

JavaScript on Pentium 3, snake with turbo pascal, sister as inspiration, the "view source" JavaScript approach, creating a platform "4b" site like FaceBook or studiVZ as first serious application with PHP on the backend and JavaScript on the frontend, using flat files as database, building GameScript with a subset of JavaScript to help colleagues to start programming, creating the first, interpreted, programming language, writing parsers by hand, the natural way to ASTs, creating software for smart homes, first commercial project with 16 - a visual programming language, great QT, how to skip a class, the two type of teachers, attending university classes before university, the best four Austrian programmers attending the competition are part of the GraalVM team now, the programming competition takes two days, five hours each, Pascal, Java or C were the languages of choice, mistakes cost time, programming is super fast and debugging is low, training for programming competition 2-3h a day, training with USA Computing Olympiad was almost like gaming, it's impossible to win a programming competition without training, ACM contest for students, a team of three students shares a computer, learning C with JavaScript background, difficulties with the constructor concept, the president of Austria attending the phd ceremony

Thomas Wuerthinger on twitter: @thomaswue, Thomas' website.