I was inspired to learn programming while vacationing in a frozen Newfoundland outport in April of 1985. It started as a desperate attempt to keep from stripping down to my shorts and disappearing into a blizzard, but became a lifelong passion along with acting, writing, and music. In keeping with this non-typical start, it was in art college where I learned my first serious programming language (6502 assembly) and later it was on a job as a technical writer and artist that I wrote my first serious code for a client, an online mortgage calculator for a credit union in British Columbia. The culmination of my programming career was finishing the PHP-GTK app, Corkboard, a writer’s tool for story planning. Don’t bother looking. It languishes here on a back-up drive.

Since dropping out of high school in 1972, I’ve made a living as a taxi driver, musician, screenwriter, technical writer, artist, sound reinforcement equipment salesman, a biology lab technician among other things. I’ve also made money acting, programming, and promoting concerts. I retired from Statistics Canada in 2010 and have since divided my time between acting, writing lame science fiction novels, pursuing the elusive X-plat beast, and keeping house for my wife of 33 years.

About a decade ago, I wrote a blog about how to build desktop applications with PHP-GTK2. After waiting for some time for someone to write a PHP compiler that handled GTK2, I moved on to other things (acting, writing, pounding keys at Statistics Canada). Then late last year, I came across D. I’d heard mentions of it a few times during the previous years, but never did much more than enjoy the irony/pun/whatever of D being the successor of C and B.

But this time, I also ran across GtkD and after some initial exploration, I decided to write this blog. And to start things off, I decided to port all my code examples from PHP-GTK2 to GtkD.

You can find the source code for Minima at GitHub: jekyll / minima

You can find the source code for Jekyll at GitHub: jekyll / jekyll