Quick Jump

About Robert W. Leonard

Programming was something my father got me into at a very young age. Tinkering with computers, making websites, and learning how programs worked were among my geekier intersts. A lot of kids get into taking things apart to look at the parts, but that wasn't necessarily the part that interested me. Instead I wanted to know how it worked, and how it could work better. Something I still use when I am working on projects.

Beyond a couple classes in college, programming is not something I've ever had formal education for. My lessons came from a number of great friends and fellow geeks. Friends would would patiently let me ask hundreds (if not thousands) of questions over the course of a couple years. I've always been a trial-and-error kind of guy, so that is naturally how I learned. I would break a helluva lot of code in the process. Incidently, I also learned to be good about backups.

I'm a bit of a freak when it comes to code. A lot of the people who have worked on my game or my website have commented on it. I've even forced them to my standards at times. But I think clean code that is well formated is the number one key to having code easy to read years down the line when you want to use it in another way. I would say that I am in best in C/C++ and PHP. I'm not sure HTML is really even worth counting anymore. Do most of us take for granted that to really use PHP you have to know HTML? I think we can. I like to build complicated systems, there's just something truly fun with it. I've done it a number of places on here, and on my wife's website, and lots of other places for those who pay attention.

I can't talk about programming without taking full advantage of plugging my text-base MMORPG. It's called a MUD and it's something I've been working on for many, many years. It took me a few versions before I stopped breaking them. What can I say? I like to tinker. The game is based on my Draknor books, and we've set up the world as similar as we could. If you like MUD's from back in the day, come check out a blast from the past. http://www.landsofdraknor.net