Profile: Scott Hamilton, Olympia programmer

                Olympia-area programmer Scott Hamilton has programmed both as a career and as a hobby for the last 15 years.

                Hamilton, 34, started working for Imagesource in Olympia, WA when he was 19 and has been with them ever since, helping provide the company’s paperless office service.

                Hamilton said he likes working on theoretical projects playing with languages for his personal projects.

                “I love programming, so it’s a hobby, and it’s a job,” Hamilton said.

                As a youth, he wanted to become a professional baseball player, golfer, or programmer, Hamilton said. He wanted to make games, because he liked programming the music and graphics for games.

                His first “real job” as a computer tech was upgrading Windows 95 for The Cheese Plate, and serving cheese, but it was not long before he moved on to Imagesource.

                At the time, in 1998, he was pursuing a technical degree at South Puget Sound Community College. One of his classmates was the owner of Imagesource. Hamilton said the owner was so impressed with Hamilton, who was tutoring others, that he hired Hamilton.

                Hamilton started working a state contract with the company putting a Visual Basic interface on a database, using an in-house framework. After that project, he decided to stick with the company. He has been working in the company’s paperless office service ever since.

                The company provides a paperless office service that involves scanning paper documents to digitize them, creating electronic forms to avoid paper in the first place, and putting together the workflow system. The role he now plays mostly involves customer interactions, mapping their business requirements to pass along to others on the team.

                Hamilton said that because of this role, he does not get to do a lot of programming at work anymore. “The programming is a treat, because that’s what I like to do,” he said.

                Hamilton said he enjoys designing languages and studying algorithms and has been able to apply cryptography at work.  He said he does not enjoy doing web presentation, but does enjoy the back end, like parsing and compiling text.

                In a recent personal project, Hamilton collaborated to create a video game in which the player pilots a space ship. He designed a basic assembly language for the ship’s computer, what is equivalent to a Commodore 64, and used Javascript to create an interpreter for that language.

                Hamilton said he enjoys learning languages, and has learned many over the years. Python is his favorite, he said, but he “appreciates” Javascript. “It’s a pretty awful language, but if you cut out all the bad parts and leave the good parts, it’s not too bad,” he said.

                If Hamilton could talk to his 19-year-old self, he said he would tell himself to pay more attention to resumes and references. He said part of him wishes he was “doing more sexy things in the programming world.”

                “Every time you do a job or project, think about it like it’s going on your resume, so you can later go back and demonstrate what you did and the relationships you formed,” he said. He said this is important not only to show potential employers, but also to show potential clients and partners.