One guy's experience with programming | Hacker News Reader

One guy's experience with programming

pianocheetah.com

252 pointsstephen_hazel44 comments

glad yall found it interesting!

side note: if anyone has any ideas about finding beta testers for my baby (erm, pianocheetah) I'd be glad hear em. can't find beta testers to save my life.

Overall, I'd say I'm pretty freakin lucky. Spoiled even. Thanks for the nice replies.

Will have to have a look at home - you have made me feel guilty about not geting on with learning keyboard. I amasuing it will work with VST'is running in live or cubase.

For your Android port? Sign me up! :)

Hey, I might be interested : I'm considering learning to play the piano in order to help me transcribe some songs (I currently doing it using my trumpet but it's pretty tiring). I'll take a look if I finally decide to buy a M-audio.

I'm interested. I already have everything necessary and I've been learning by myself since few months. Should I contact you through the email on the website?

stephen.hazel@gmail.com please :)

Have a Yamaha Tyros and happy to test

"it is what it is"

This is where my mind usually lands when the symbol meets the semantics and the hardware. But there's usually another world in what 'is' is.

I look up to people like you, and aspire to compose a similar list. It looks like you always chased your interest, no matter where it took you. Luck can be a huge part of it, and it can make you feel spoiled. But on the other hand, I always looked at it as being a bit optimistic and maybe a having a mind that is both opportunistic and capable of winging it on a connection. When it seems like there's nothing there to learn about, there's usually something there. That's a bit of luck though. Some people think having the opportunity to be in the right place to be educated is the gift; I tend to think the stable, persistent interest deserves more credit than it's been given. It's hard venturing into unknown territory. Sometimes it can make me feel like I can only look back at a distant point where everything seemed to make sense and I had it all understood, and the adventure itself has gotten me so lost, that I'm not sure I know less or more than I did before.

I have been playing the piano as a hobbyist for at least a decade (some lessons as a kid), and have an m-audio midi controller 88 key in storage that should get some use. If you are looking for a tester, that's one of my leading interests. Email at petitecomputer[AT]gmail.com if you would like to get in touch. You'd also probably do well looking/posting here: http://www.reddit.com/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers/

Wow. Did not expect this much awesomeness.

If you're interested in beta testin (helpin me find n swat the GOD DAMN bugs in this thing and givin me "clean up that GUI" tips, etc) please email me. I can explain the program better for ya and help you along with piano a BIT. (But, really, you'll want a piano teacher.) I want to keep the source to myself (sorry!). Some day, if enough people bother to use it (not so far), I may start chargin'. That's my dream. But I would not be chargin' any beta testers of course ever.

My android port is a long ways off. I'm juuuuuust starting it. Planning on using java for GUI only and NDK beneath. But it's going to take a long time.

oh, err, stephen.hazel@gmail.com (it's on the site, but, ya know)

I love the idea of PianoCheetah, when I get my piano out of storage will definitely give it a whirl.

I tried looking at the demo video to get an idea of what it does, but (almost literally) couldn't follow along to save my life!

To get more testers etc I would 100% focus getting really good youtube videos out there. You don't even have to make them!

When I hear about a program like this, all I really want to know immediately is what it feels like to play with it. Do a couple of "Let's Play" style videos, show us how much fun you have playing piano with this tool. It will sell itself after that :)

those are some great ideas. The video I have is old as the hills. So my goals for this week(or 2): - a decent modern video of just practicing a song - a page of the "why" of pianocheetah

thanks!

I've also had a Spectra, and after that an 88 weighted keys alesis QS8. had the ZX Spectrum (i'm still using n as default for loop variable) and then got the marvelous commodore 128. good old days. I was born in '71.

> (i'm still using n as default for loop variable)

Haha! I'm glad I'm not the only one.

lol you can tell who the old school Fortan programers are a sthey will use i and j

I thought everyone used i and j? No seriously, my first language was VB 6 (or 5?), so I'm not remotely old-school.

Well, if you go far enough in math, you'll learn the i, j, etc. convention, which is where FORmulaTRANslation got it (unless otherwise declared, variable names starting with i through n are integer).

And you might learn it indirectly from all the people and code that follow this convention. In my case, it was FORTRAN first, albeit perhaps in the same academic year 1977-8 where I was introduced to i, j, etc. in Algebra II.

Oh god, I've always thought that i stood for "index". And j...Well it is the most logical name for the next index. :D

It might, I don't know the origin of i, j etc. in math....

Actually it stands for "iterator" and j and k are alphabetically next so your assumption there is spot on. I worked at a company that had coding standards that were put in place by a group of people who said "you can't use 1 letter abbreviations as they don't make any sense" to which I replied with "unless your using an iterator in a loop". Exception found.

Oh thanks for clarifying that!

I use i,j for 2dimensional arrays in Java. I learned programming in ... 2010.

Or C or Java programmers... i and j are still the convention in all the mainstream imperative languages.

At some point I considered myself a "grownup" because I stopped using the following loop variables: i, cnt, counter, ctr, var, crap, junk, idx. Whatever. I'm back to using i now, though instances of coding a loop are almost gone since I prefer FP these days.

I grew up on a ZX Spectrum but never got around to programing on it. I've always wanted to start dabbling with assembly on a relatively-simple platform, it's like a nagging unfinished business in the back of my head.

Can you recommend any good resources (preferably books available online) to start with, that one could apply in an emulator?

Hmmm, I don't use assembly any more. I've settled on c++ (and java when forced into it). It's nice to know especially in that you get a real tight handle on what a CPU actually is. But I'm not sure how to go about learning it these days. The only thing I did on my ZX81 was use it's so called graphics mode to plot successive shrinking squares (using "fast mode" where it turned the graphics off for speed)

assembly was the only way to do anything on the XZ81,C64. You needed it a little on the Amiga and MS/DOS graphics (with C doing most the work). On Win95 I used it for a hi res timer (only a couple lines). But haven't used it since. If I were to dig in now, I miiiight start with the C++ compiler's assembly listings. Look at your C++, look at the unoptimized assembly the compiler generates and see how they equate. Google will find quite a few sites of people still using 80x86 assembly I think. Good luck to ya.

> Kathy turned out to be a jerk.

I saw that one coming. She left him a few time and trying to get back with her ex.

Not good at all.

But overall, the dude seems well and surprisingly his Oracle's skill is the one that is the most useful...

Oracle's skills are very, very useful when your problem is paying the bills. I've done 6502 asm in the commodore 128, 80286, 386 and also ORACLE & public sector large "enterprise-y" software on the other hand. Guess which one pays the bills?

Beautiful story in so many ways. Thank you. Lots of similarities here, though I was self taught & ended up (very, very happily) at Microsoft for a few years. Your stories of family were enormously powerful & bittersweet. what a ride.

Nice story, Steve. It's cool to look back over a career / life and think about what you've done and where you're going still. I think I'm about 15 yrs from where you're at... also a fan of music, although due to coding and career and kid, I end up not doing any music practice. :-| But I code music-related apps! Hehe.

any music related apps I can see? :)))

good for you !

As someone who happens to be 16 years old, I am incredibly jealous, and can't help but feeling that my experiences with technology and programming in particular are either spoon-fed or diminished in some other manner, and that won't change in the future. Or perhaps it's just differences in perspective and point of view. :)

I felt similar at your age when reading through Popular Electronics. I'd think to myself "this soldering is FRUSTRATING - how can these guys KNOW so much stuff".

It's not important to be the best. Trying to beat everyone else in the entire world is really pretty silly when you think about it.

Follow the boyscout motto and do YOUR best. That's something achievable. Given your circumstances, find some passions, consider how you should prioritize them, and just keep learning about them and practicing.

Life is relatively long. You don't need to be an expert, just have a passion for it. That passion over time will FORCE you into becoming an expert in whatever it is you love.

But it's important to identify what it is you love early on so time can work it's magic on ya. And keep the passions list short to concentrate the buildup.

It doesn't need to be computer programming. It is for me, of course :)

I enjoyed it Steve. Shared a lot of the same early experiences I think. Tape drives!

And the comadore disk drives I used to know all of the diferent models quirks

did you put the new driver into it to speed it the heck up from slow to reasonable? ah, good memories.

It was more the nack of seating the floppys on the erlier drives 3000 and 4000 starting the drive running before closing the door and a sharp tap in the right place.

Great story. I went Vic20->Spectrum->Amiga 500->windows PC->Linux.

Given I studied electronic eng I also expected to be doing something low level, but ended up doing enterprise oracle too for most of my career.

Spectrum -> Commodore 64 -> DOS -> Windows 3.1 ... Windows 8 -> Mac OS X here.

I've always wanted to go back and code for the Spectrum and C64, then play around on an Amiga, something I never got to do.

Great article. I love this style of free flowing retrospective with pictures of old technology. The Radio Shack 160-in-one electronics kit was awesome.

yeah, I'm trying to get into robotics cuz it reminds me of my electronics past. but my prio is pianocheetah and i'm kinda outa time. But I plan on teachin it to my grandson if he shows interest. Next to my c64, that's probably the most time I've spent on anything.

very cool - I think this hit right at the right time when I am semi-nostalgic on Thanksgiving and tend to reflect on my own past with C64s trs80s etc.

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