Dateline: Spyplane somewhere over the North Atlantic
Note: This month we capture a few precious moments with the elusive cal henderson - co-admin/silent partner in ubbdev enterprises, playboy geek extraordinaire and owner of the highly successful iamcal network. Don't be fooled by the self-deprecating humor folks, he is the real thing and can write circles around most people when it comes to perl/php/asp/ and sometimes english.

UBBDev : Thankyou for taking some time to answer a few questions First, for the newbies, please give us a little background info - What is your ummmm... background, and how did you get into web development?

cal henderson : No problem. Well I was (and still am) a software engineering student when I got caught up in the whole "web development" thing. I started out writing web COM objects in C, but later moved to perl, php, lasso, asp and a whole lot besides. I've been a professional web applications developer for about 3 years now and have created a multitude of corporate and personal sites (including ubbhackers.com with Charles Capps, Chris 'Stallion' Lambert, Mike 'Ed' Sullivan and Jason 'Sir Nikon' Kruzak). My personal site is here [ http://www.iamcal.com/ ].



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UBBDev : Ahhhh.. the old days - fun times... What drew you to the UBB and hacking/patching code?

cal : I was brought into a project requiring UBB (5.4) and I was asked to apply some design changes. After a bit of searching around, I discovered a 'hacking' community and had a look at what they were doing. Back then not all the 'big hacks' had been created and things like "Who's Online" and "Private Messages" were still hack ideas rather than core features. After making a multitude of changes to the board I was working on, I realised that I may have created some features that people would like. So I released some hacks and helped other people get their hacks to release quality.

As far as patching goes, I accidentally provide technical support for some of the biggest UBB sites in the world, and we're often uncovering bugs. As a member of the UBB development community, I think it's important to share any bug fixes and optimisations back with the community, so I've done some work sending patches to Infopop for inclusion in the official UBB distribution. I've also done quite a lot of work on optimising the UBB source, reducing and simplifying code, though I don't have as much time to do that as I'd like.

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UBBDev : Yes, congrats, I've seen your name in the source code. What are your main passions in regards to community development?

cal : I really think that the technology should help support, rather than get in the way of, communication. Whilst adding a million and one modifications to your board is 'cool', creating an application that is both easy to use and engaging is a great achivement. Usability, stability and intuition are vital to a sucessful web application.

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UBBDev : What are some things we as a development community need to focus on, both in developing our own personal sites and in building a more professional development site? Does CVS play a part? And how?

cal : The greatest things about working with UBBDev over the past few years has been collaborating with some of the brilliant talent that the UBB community has to offer. Collaboration has led to some of the best modifications and has helped those involved to develop skills they wouldn't have on their own. At the center of UBBDev's collaboration, we've used a CVS source repository to share and archive code. CVS [ http://www.cvshome.org/ ] is a code versioning system which is fantastic for sharing code, keeping track of code modifications and rolling back changes which don't work. A central CVS repository for the UBB would be a fantastic thing, but I doubt we'll see that any time soon.

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UBBDev : You have developed several very nice software programs, are you still working on them? Someone wanted to know how the chat application was going in particular.

cal : I'm still developing open source software in my spare time. You can see it all at [ http://www.iamcal.com/software/ ]. The chat program was written for a Advanced-Level computing project which I haven't updated for a few years. If people have bug reports or feature requests, then I'd love to hear from them.

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UBBDev : I've seen your work applauded across a wide variety of other sites, can you give us some ideas regarding what you are working on now?

cal : UBB-wise I'm doing some work integrating UBB with the UBBthreads database and doing some general core optimisation. Outside of the UBB I'm working on a lot of personal projects which can all be found at the iamcal network [ http://www.iamcal.com/network/ ].


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UBBDev : Will you ever release a 6.x hack?

cal : They're not called hacks anymore But perhaps. The database modifications I've created may get released one day. A dual hack to get UBB and UBBthreads to use a seperate members system is in the pipeline too.

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UBBDev : 'Member that time when you wrote that hack, and it got used on all the UBB's out there? 'Member that? Boy, that was awesome!

cal : Yes, I was there...

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UBBDev : Awww.. that's right! I am so stupid! Arghh! Man! Ummm.. ok, what's the last book you read?

cal : Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins.

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UBBDev : Now for the nitty-gritty. Sources tell us you go by a pseudonym. Is Cal Henderson your real name?

cal : Yes. Sort of. Not really. No. My real name is Callum Henderson-Begg.

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UBBDev : There you have it folks! An exclusive interview with cal and the inside 411 on his anonymity on the web. Thank you cal