UBB.Developers Forums Announcements Announcements U-Zine Interviews May 2002: Featured Programmer :: Qasic

Interviewed by: LK
Interviewee: qasic

UBBDev:
Welcome to the U-Zine, and thank you for taking your time to answer our questions. What is your background?
qasic:
My name is Ka-Lok Funk, aka Jason Downey. My first experience with Basic was with the Apple Basic language, and that was only in Grade 5.
My first _real_ experience with computers was when my uncle gave me his old 386 as a graduation gift at the end of Grade 7. I learned how to fool with DOS and Windows.
I have just finished Cmpt 275 (software engineering 1) at Simon Fraser University.

UBBDev:
Cool! When did you get into the UBB/UBBDev scenes?
qasic:
I was introducted to the UBB @ http://pokegym.thedojo.com (the site no longer exists), where I was an active member of the Pokemon: Trading Card Game community. I was hired as a news reporter and gradually that role progressed to me hacking the UBB with various addons cause Tyais, my boss, had no luck
UBBDev... I believe it was a few months after UBBCodeHackers was dismantled. I had a hard time finding ubbdev. ubbcodehackers.com wasn't that great, UBBDev was better but that's all history

UBBDev:
What's your programming background?
qasic:
I learned Commodore Basic, Apple II Basic, QBasic, GWBasic, QuickBasic, VB for DOS (betcha you never knew it existed), Visual Basic for Windows now. I also know Java. My nick derives from QBasic - qbasic without the b.

UBBDev:
That's a lot, I hardly know C++ and Turbo Pascal. What was the first hack you wrote?
qasic:
I'll have to dig up my archives for this one... It removed "Powered by Infopop" from the UBB title. Porting of Downin's SigLimit and NickBan to UBB 6 was my first "real" hack, you should see the code differences from then and now

UBBDev:
What was the most difficult hack to write and why?
qasic:
Difficult hacks are really relative. Hacks I usually tend to write are written because I want to learn a particular structure in Perl. The hardest one thus far would be ModLog, because the datastructures won't be easy to understand for your average John Doe hackers. It's hashes of hashes of hashes, hashes of anonymous arrays, intelligent-indexed basic archive, you get the point. One of the reasons I picked up Camel Also Avatar was an intellectual challange, because it's the hack that really broke me on the UBB hacking scene.

UBBDev:
Besides UBB hacks, what kind of programming have you done?
qasic:
Qasic.NET would be the best example - totally dynamic websites using PHP/Perl, my BASIC programming varies from game editing all the way to building GUI's in Visual Basic.

UBBDev:
What are some of the new dev tools or languages that you're getting into?
qasic:
In terms of languages, I'm just getting past the basics of VB - did you know VB has hash tables? ouch. There's so much to learn even though most consider VB to be a simple language. Oh yeah, Microsoft Access too

UBBDev:
No, I didn't know that What's your definition of a 'killer application'?
qasic:
A killer app would be one that suits my needs (functional and nonfunctional requirements)

UBBDev:
If you were going to start a new never-done-before hack today, what would it be?
qasic:
I love Borg's idea of a tic-tac-toe game via PM - it will have realtime possibilities, like the PM notifier. No promises though.

UBBDev:
Sounds cool! What advice can you give to the newer generation of code hackers?
qasic:
Get your feet in by fixing others hack. Don't release it as your own, get the original to distro the fix. If the author is MIA (missing in action), try e-mail. If finally, that doesn't work, then release the fix yourself.

UBBDev:
That's what I did, I released my first hack 2 months after joining UBBDev. What are some of the helpful web resources that you use?
qasic:
I love Webmonkey , the MySQL Perl reference , plus the ActiveState help files. I usually prefer books to online help files, especially Camel.