When I was 13

My father gave me the opportunity to use my budding programming skills in my first real job when I was 13 years old: building a digital preflight program for the aviation school at Westminster College. This software was used to familiarize the flight school students with the components of the Archer III Piper before they ever set foot in the cockpit. The instructors would also use this software in the classroom to discuss the airplane’s details and prepare students for preflight checks.

There were two main components of this software: an interactive presentation where the users could navigate around and inside the airplane, and a scrolling image viewer that showed users full-size photos and let them drag the image around to get up-close detail of components.

Interactive presentation

After many painstaking hours photographing the Piper, my dad spent days in our house scanning the film and digitally mastering the images. To this day, I can still remember the constant hum-screech of the film scanner running, day after day. Using these brilliant photos, he created an interactive presentation (in the old Astound presentation software, no less) where you could click on different parts of the airplane as if you were walking around it.

Scrolling image viewer

While on any image in the presentation, you could click the “Viewer” button which would launch you into my full-screen image viewer. My job in this project was to create an image viewer where one could scroll around these huge images by clicking and dragging. This allowed the professors and students to inspect the different components of the airplane and its engine in great detail, and gave the instructors the ability to focus on specific areas by drawing on them with “Notation Pens” or placing large arrows on the important parts. When you were done, you would simply exit and be right back where you were in the presentation.

With the perfectionism of my dad and I combined, we just kept going long after the basics were done. By its completion we had even built an updating system that could upgrade the whole software package from online updates, a customized installer for distribution, a note-taking system, and a printing system that would capture a selected part of an image and embed it in a Word doc (see last picture).

So much of this seems trivial to me now, but this was my first experience with building a real UI, my first experience with deploying software, and truly my first deadline. To me, those were very valuable things to learn at such a young age and this project helped me realize how much I really love doing this.