Coding College

I had the pleasure of interviewing a great well known PHP coder. He goes by the name NGpixel and has worked on some famous sites like Pixel2life.com, Advance-Gamers.com and wowscape.net. He runs his own company at Ngpixel.com. His real name is Nicolas and is only 18 years old but has made many accomplishments in the computer field.

Why did you decided to learn to code?
At first, I wanted to build my own tutorial indexing system. But at that time, I was relying on Wordpress, definitely not the best system for tutorials… but with some editing, it worked. The limitations of Wordpress became too much apparent at some point so I decided to build a system from scratch. I’ve been editing scripts before but I never really looked at the opportunity to build my own system. Even if I needed some tutorials, it wasn’t that hard at first, I had some VisualBasic 6 knowledge already from high school.

How long have you been coding?
PHP: about 4 years

How did you get involved with the team at Pixel2life?
I first applied to be part of the Twodded team to write tutorials on Fireworks and SwishMax. A few months later, Twodded was almost dead and Jay (programmer of v2) left Pixel2Life. I took the opportunity and talked with Dan (Faken) if I could join the team. Considering the situation, he was more than happy to have someone to code v3. I could code PHP without too much problem at that time but I never worked on such a big project. I learned most of PHP while developing P2L. From classes usage to speed/optimization from cache and queries, all these little things that are, most of the time, not important in smaller projects, but they have a huge impact on heavy traffic websites.

How long have you been lead programmer on Pixel2life?
At the same time I joined the coding team (May 2006 if I remember). V3 was in development at that time. Jamie (Chaos King) joined the next day. About that “lead” title, it’s simply because of my location. Dan and I live in the same city so it’s just easier to talk if there’s an issue but admins at P2L are all on the same level. You’re not limited to what Dan tells you, most of the time you bring your own ideas and your own projects. They just end up being part of P2L. But now that Adam joined the coding team, it’s now easier than ever to give the boring tasks to him.

What other fun/interesting projects have you been involved with
because of your coding skills?
I’m currently working on a huge Wii project called WiiMedia since a year. The problem right now with Wii websites is they are small, many of them are poorly done and they don’t offer much. Users are struggled to use many websites for little services. WiiMedia is a central website that offers all the possible Wii content and services to users. All Wii and Virtual Console games are indexed with complete info, savegames, reviews, news and more. The cool feature though is a sub-site called WiiNode that handle all the user logins. This feature will be implemented on Pixel2Life V5 next year. Since we use many domains (WiiMedia, WiiNode, WiiCade (our partner), WiiCountdown, etc.) it’s not possible to have a seamless user experience without requiring to login every time. WiiNode eliminates this problem by centralizing all user login to 1 single website. Basically, you login only once, then while you visit any of the other websites, you can still use that account without having to login again and again. WiiNode also provides a fast and easy way to search other members for their Wii Friend codes. You can list the games you have, your Friend codes, savegames and more on your profile page. Finally, we have a revolutionary feature called WiiNode Connect which enable Wii users to interact with their console from their PC. For example, you can choose to be notified on your Wii when a specific game is released or get a summary of today news. You can even be notified when a user wants to add you as a friend and accept the invitation directly on your Wii! We plan to release this project in December 2007. Stay Tuned!

Do you have any pointers/tips for people looking to get into coding?
I often hear people saying they want to learn C++ when they never programmed before. You should always start with easy languages such as Visual Basic to get the concept. Then you can move to OOP languages like Java. Most languages are extremely similar in syntax so moving from one to the other is quite simple (most are based on C language, like PHP, Java and Actionscript). Also, don’t expect to be able to code another IPB or Linux as your first project. Start with a project of a small scale then gradually move to something bigger.