There is a very high percentage of the development community that is atheist.

Percentage wise, we give the general population a run for their money - it is made of perhaps the most pro-secular and anti-theist people out there in one industry with the possible exception of the biochemistry sector.

The reasons behind that stance don’t really interest me (or rather they do, but I won’t be addressing them here right now), but I know if it wasn’t for my Catholic upbringing - specifically observation of Lent - I’d not be writing this article right now. In fact I wouldn’t even be in the computer industry period: I’d probably be a lawyer.

Thank goodness for my own sanity - and the freedom of ‘my clients’ currently incarcerated in a parallel universe - that I manged to learn to code. I thought that as today is Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day, if you wish), and tomorrow marks the start of Lent, I’d explain how it happened, because it’s driving me to get involved in community programmes over the next few years.

When I was 11 years old, I was attending a small Catholic school in Buxton. These days they even have a homepage and are helping to develop vocational science and mathematics skills, but back then in the Spring of 1990 the only IT kit in the whole school was a room of BBC Micros with a couple of Archimedes machines.

I loved those machines.

They were old even then, and it was already getting difficult to find a supply of decent 5.25” floppy disks for the BBCs and the Archimedes were really picky about the brands of modern 3.5” disks they would take. The only real software we had available for them was the built-in BBC BASIC and a small collection of education software used in lessons.

One day I discovered a book in the small school library. It was about how to program BBC BASIC. My Father was by this point a systems analyst and I’d seen programs before and always thought it might be interesting to learn.

This wasn’t some heavy tome similar to modern programming books like the wall of 400+ page back-busters I have behind me right now. It was perhaps 90 pages, cartoon illustrated with robots pretending to be FOR loops and was about as basic as BASIC could be. It was designed for young budding programmers from a stance of “we know you don’t want to do this, but we’ll help you make it fun”. The fact I did want to learn made it even more fun.

Over the course of Lent, the computing teacher at the time offered to open up the computer room - a space which is now inhabited by secretaries in a reception area I believe - during lunch hour. You would have to forgo your lunch hour and realistically most or all of your lunch, and pay up at least 40p to the CAFOD box. This would give you use of the room to work on your own projects, and each lunchtime lots of guys (it was always guys, a problem we still have in the industry) from every year group would pile in and quite frankly, geek out on BASIC programs.

Those weeks running up to Easter were quite an extraordinary time now I look back at it. I was perhaps a little hungry from lack of food, but my appetite for these strange incantations was more than fulfilled - I was writing real, working software.

My fascination for software grew. Every time I got to work on code, I did. We couldn’t afford much hardware at home, so I’d go back to the ancient method dating back to the era of Kilburn of writing up programs on paper with a pencil or pen, and then typing them up when I could.

Much of my work from that time is lost, but what remains is remarkably precocious: expert systems and basic AI seems to have been one of my interests, an area I’d struggle to get to grips with today without a few weeks of reading up, and I’d never even begin to try and write it up in BASIC.

Eventually, the school’s IT systems got a little more modern. Mostly Archimedes, but at least one Apple (which to be fair, I hated - it’s only since OS X that I managed to get on with them) and a single PC used for careers service work.

Here’s a photo of me and some classmates in my GCSE computing class, by which point the computing classroom had moved to a larger space. Many of you who know me today will be surprised to note I really did have hair once:

Within a few years of that photo being taken I was making money in my spare time with the skills I had developed, and preparing to study Software Engineering at UMIST. Those skills ultimately led to a career that involved building out ISP infrastructure, working on R&D projects at GCHQ, traveling to the Falklands on contract, working within a University and ultimately (at least to date) setting up my own small software consultancy and development company.

With the exception of some bar work whilst at University (and the infamous year as professional gambler), every penny I have ever earned has been because of the skills I started to pick up that Spring.

Each year then, despite the fact I am now more agnostic than I am Catholic, I remember and observe Lent. I fast. I go hungry and develop an appetite for something else.

This year I’m going without alcohol and fast food, which most programmers I know would find hard to imagine doing for six weeks. Those of you who know me from GeekUp will find the abstinence from alcohol particularly amusing.

Normally I find it helps me remember how little my family and I had, and I remember that it was through my enthusiasm - and my teachers’ encouragement - for mucking about with machines with bright orange function keys that I managed to gain so much.

The fact I was able to be enthused by something so big, philosophical, creative and vocational at a young age has really stuck. Last week I had a meeting with MDDA about trying to get more kids involved in this industry.

It followed on from a meeting at the Co-working day where some of us established we had learned as kids how to program and that we’re worried that’s not happening any more. Twenty years from now, we might be the only people around who can write code and be excited by it. I want to help fix that, but right now don’t know how. As I work it out, I’ll keep you all in the loop.

If you’re giving up something for Lent, good luck and remember Sundays are optional. If not, at least enjoy your pancakes this evening.