 How did you get started in hacking/programming?
jim_lawless: In the late 70's while in my teens, I was interested in making video games.  I had a TRS-80 and learned BASIC and then Z-80 assembly-language.  I then bought a Commodore 64 and learned more languages while at a tech school.  I became a programmer for banking software and never really got a game off the ground.To answer your second question, I wish that I had some insight into software design as I was learning to program.  Too often, I would kludge through something in BASIC ... that was the mental model of the software that I retained.  It was hard to translate something like that into assembly-language or anything other than BASIC.I took a course in Pascal which helped to organize my approach to problem decomposition and program design.