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Interview with Ben Mickle
Posted by Michael on 9 March 2006, 15:43 GMT
Our third interview in the series is with Ben Mickle, author of the famous Super Mario 86. Read on for the interview.
| Interview with Ben Mickle |
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| Michael | How old are you currently and what education have you had? |
| Ben | I'm 21 years old. I'm a senior at Duke University, majoring in (not surprisingly) Computer Science and Math.
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| Michael | Have you done any other programming since you left the TI community? |
| Ben | Yes. I haven't done any big projects on my own, but I've written tons of short programs, mostly just to gain more experience with C++ and algorithms.
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| Michael | What else have you been doing in general? Jobs? Hobbies? Travelling? |
| Ben | I've done a couple internships at Microsoft (which is a target for a fair amount of animosity, but it turns out they have some great internship opportunities). Last summer, I worked on a new feature for Windows Vista. In fact, I recently decided to work at Microsoft full-time after I graduate. I also traveled to Shanghai last spring for the ACM contest. Outside of programming, I like to follow sports (we have a pretty good basketball team at Duke), watch movies, sleep in, listen to music, and procrastinate on homework assignments.
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| Michael | The project that made you famous was Super Mario 86. Is there anything you'd like to share about your motivation for starting that? |
| Ben | I was just starting to become comfortable writing assembly, and I wanted to do something big and challenging to apply my new skills. There was some skepticism about the Z80 being fast enough to handle a grayscale side-scrolling game, so I thought that would be a good project. Since I was more interested in writing code than designing a game story and graphics, I decided to make Super Mario.
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| Michael | Do you think the community has changed since you were active? If so, how and has it gotten better or worse?
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| Ben | The active people in the community have changed quite a bit. A lot of the old personal websites are gone, or haven't been updated in years. Nonetheless, it still seems bigger now than it was when I found it in '97. I actually liked it better when it was small, because it was easier to feel like everyone knew each other. One of the big differences is that there are so many programs available now, which is good for users, but not so exciting for programmers.
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| Michael | What's the best thing you remember about the TI community? Worst thing?
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| Ben | One of the best things I remember was the A86 mailing list. There was a lot of great collaboration, and I think the archives are still the best place to learn about the internals of the TI-86. The worst thing about the TI community was the presence of a few deliberately obnoxious people on the comment boards. |
| Michael | Have you ever met any other community members in real life? |
| Ben | Yes, I've met Jonah Cohen a couple times. I've seen Ben Mardell. Sam Heald is a friend of mine in real life since he also went to Duke.
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| Michael | Do you have any advice for programmers who are just getting started? |
| Ben | The first thing you should do is read some introductory material, such as a book or tutorial. Once you know the basics of a language such as Java, C++, or Basic, I recommend doing two things: write a lot of code and read a lot of code. If you don't know what to write, you can find tons of stuff at sites like http://acm.uva.es/problemset/ or TopCoder. TopCoder is also a great place to read some really clever and short code by some of the best programmers. Most importantly, work on things that interest you so that you don't give up after an hour.
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| Michael | What do you think of TI's newer calculators?
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| Ben | The 86 has always been my favorite. I would have liked to see an 87, but I must admit the USB port on the newer models is a cool feature.
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Re: Interview with Ben Mickle
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tifreak8x 
(Web Page)
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Quite an interesting read. :) It is cool that some of the older members can still be found so interviews with them can happen. :)
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9 March 2006, 19:05 GMT
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