How did you start out at programming, what's your story?

[DevBlox]

Hello, usually silent fly on the wall here. So, I just got a little bit nostalgic, decided maybe it's a good idea to ask the community on what your roots at programming are. Motivations? The Spark? How did you learn? When did you learn? What did you learn? Do you still program nowadays? Maybe someone starting out can take a bit of inspiration, and I get to read other peoples experiences, win win

 

So my short story here:

 

The Background. Since a young age, I've been exposed to computers, it was mainly my older brother (11 years older) who taught me basics, taught me to play (first game Half-Life at age 4), he was not knowledgeable in programming ever, though. But what he would always do (and taught me to) is to pirate games and software. Buying all that was not an option in my family, by my country's standards we weren't poor, but when you translate software prices in dollars to our currency the figures used to be very large, and, needless to say, were not granted by our parents. Some pirated things are easy to set up, but some are a bit involved, and I've always wondered how things work under there.

 

So the Origins - 14 yo. summer vacation, bored out of my mind (I think every friend was out of the city) I pick up an old old laptop that dad had brought home from an old office, it ran Win 98 (this thing was ancient at 2009, now it would be a relic), found it had a 3D Rage GPU and had a Pentium (don't remember any more details unfortunately). So I did the next logical step, and just installed the original Doom and binged it. I remember stumbling upon some scripts, and wondered how they work, said something to my bro, so he gave me this programming book (Turbo Pascal 7.0), so I just kind of started learning. Oh and that laptop became my 'learning to program' machine, since I could keep it. So, Turbo Pascal 7.0, with DOS like console interfaces, Turbo Debugger. Over time I started using the family PC (which was old too, AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (K7!) CPU, NVIDIA GeForce FX5800). Started using Lazarus IDE (which is still around, and I remember it being pretty good), I could write OS applications with GUI!

 

So I've learned that much, so it's time to approach the IT teacher in school. There I learn that 10th grade you can choose learn C++, or you can do crappy web pages. In my mind I have already picked C++ and went straight home to learn it. Forgot all about Pascal after that, rightfully so. Even learned OOP with C++ to some extent, delved into the complex topics, but not really using them well, quality of code was crap for a long time still. A year passes and it's time to learn C++ in class. At that point I knew more C++ than my teacher (she was a teacher that learned to program, not the other way around), so I ended up doing my assignments quickly and then helping others. Simultaneously I discovered that uni at a nearby city were doing remote 'lessons' for my age group. They were basically - you get an assignment, you solve it in a week, and a uni student gives feedback on your work. That program was awesome (for me at least). Some uni students wouldn't bother too much and would just not put any effort into teaching. But the one who looked at my solutions, saw the spark in me, and just hammered down on my code quality, on structure, and always encouraged me to find more ways than one to find a solution. This was all in text basically. The next year I would also apply, but that student wasn't really into teaching much and complexity remained the same, so I did not learn much at that point. But that year was the year I got the Raspberry PI, the first model. This would be a moment that you would call a career changing moment, but it was not a career at this point. But that thing changed the way I looked at hardware, I researched so much, that at one point, I've helped a guy in this used-to-be-popular forum (in my country at least) to write 3D printer software in C++ on RPI, we could work without meeting, since I could test my code myself on a screen. The code still wasn't really impressive though, and I ended up not finishing the thing unfortunately. This basically sums up my final year in high-school.

 

I live in a small town at this point, that means, I need to move out for uni. At that point also, I was done with studying and wanted to work. So I found one internship (disguised as a company project for uni students), who were impressed with my skill, but did not get hired, that whole after-project process was a bit lengthy, but I figured they just didn't like that I was that young (almost 19 at that point). That finished, uni starts, first year, I'm just not ecstatic to be there, I want to do my own thing, d^#% it! It's so bad, that after half a year of just uni, I'm starting to fail, because this in not what I want. The upside, I made friends, who still are friends to this day. And suddenly, into my uni email, pops up the email for a 3 month long internship (also disguised as a project for students, and it was paid wow!). I won't really go into details who this company is, but they were and are still amazing. They actually had multiple projects, I picked a web front end one (I wanted to switch up things), I went to an interview (first was HR interview), she noticed my skills, and immediately after asked me if I want to join another team, because there were stronger members, and I would fit right in. I said yes.

 

That team was in charge of making a high-load weather lookup by IP program. By itself, it wasn't difficult. The catch was high-load, and that was some epic foreshadowing for me. Oh and the tech was .NET C#, so I've learned that. So we made our application in those months, managed to crank about 7k requests per second from a crappy laptop, probably could have done more, but we weren't that experienced anyway. We were overlooked by an actual dev team, which was awesome by itself, because we learned a lot. The other thing is that the reason the project was high-load, is because the team had a high-load project. Talking about 1M requests per second, and the processing were not a walk in a park either. Responses also had to be send off within 80ms. The tech, of course, was C#. So yeah, I got hired at age 19 into a company that tries it's best to be on the edge of tech, whose projects are exciting as hell, and people are really nice. I ended up working there for 3 years. Halfway through I switched to being a DevOps Engineer, because I was good at Linux apparently (my team was all only Win knowledgeable) and was invited to do so by my manager, to which I said yes. I've since left the company, I've felt (did not know, just felt) that my DevOps team (made of me and another IT admin guy) was to be disbanded (global company project reorganize was started to happen), and even though I had freedom to do what I want basically, I wanted to explore the waters (as this is the only company that I've worked for yet), raise my pay-check and kick myself in the butt a little bit.

 

The next company is quite a bit more modest, the projects are PHP,  but the people are really nice. In the mean time on the uni side, got to dabble with synthetic biology, and made some software for that in Go, that project was really interesting, got to travel to US because of it. I'm probably going to get back to it at some point. My relationship with uni is turbulent, a mix between I need to get a degree, and I want to work and do exciting things, I've skipped (postponed kind of) some years. A lot to tell there, but I won't go into detail, this is already a lengthy one. Back at the not uni side, the company I worked for half a year, before deciding to travel with my gf, and the company offered me to work for them remotely, which I'm grateful for. Quit uni, decided screw the degree, I'll have one when I want one (or desperately need one :D). So I'm still doing DevOps, for a company on the other side of the globe, travelling and working (I'm actually living in a van right now, working off of solar power lol). I'm still learning new things and trying to create something new (currently going at Go pretty hard). Still excited to create and to learn.

 

So that's it. tl;dr, I've programmed for 10 years, has been my hobby, now a career. I'm interested what other people here have experienced! Tell me your story!

[boey]

Was kinda interested in computers(hardware) and school was offering CS as an optional subject. I took it up mostly because the lessons were held in an air-conditioned room(weather here is really hot) and found out after a while that I really liked programming. 

[CodeNova]

Started programing, very young, with plans of world domination. Many years passed before I realized that I was a small fish in a big pond. So, I'm either going to find a smaller pond or a tiny world, I hear Pluto is nice.

[Dat Guy]

I was bored when I was young, so I spent some time reading and writing DOS batch files and I tried to learn Pascal and Basic. Being an immature teenager, I wanted to write malware, of course. Because that was too easy (my first own "programs" basically were batch files that formatted your hard disk), I spent more and more time with Visual Basic and Delphi and I wrote a growing number of small tools. As this was long before "VB.net", most of my Visual Basic code was actually VBA code in Word and Excel.

 

Not much later, I wrote my first PHP code for the web and played with Perl and a number of other languages. C/C++ and ASM came surprisingly late.

So I had more than 13 years of "programming" experience when I got my first paid job as a developer in 2010.

 

I still aim for world domination. Very few of my personal applications find a relatively large number of users, but I'm working on that.

[camjocotem]

I was a bit of a tinkerer, poking around html source/opening things in notepad that I couldn't possibly read/took apart stuff hoping I could put it back together/

Was incredibly impressed (and still am) by people who make mods for games without an SDK or the original source to work with.

My naiive 13 year old self figured I should really start at the beginning and really learn coding so I searched "learn Basic Programming" which I believe brought me VB tutorials on how to do very specific things but not very much on actual basics

My first tutorial was on "Make your own web browser!"

I learned nothing useful from that tutorial

Fast forward to college where I done an IT course (with programming) and the very little I knew came in handy

Then came Software Engineering at University which was a bit disappointing but pretty much covered all the fundamentals of what I'd need to know

I learnt fastest in my first programming Job at a Software House with a very short-tempered boss (who was also the only person I could ask for programming help)

I  learnt fastest there because I was studying a lot when I got home to try and make up for what I didn't know at work.

I thankfully quit that job and moved onto somewhere more supportive and these days I'm really enjoying programming

[Mira Yurizaki]

If you consider it programming, my first foray into something like it was messing around with the Starcraft map editor and trying to make story based missions like in the campaign.

 

But with a programming language, that'd with Visual Basic, programming the game Dots and Boxes because it was popular where I went to high school. And I tinkered around a bit with TI BASIC when they gave us TI-83s to play around with.

[DevBlox]

8 hours ago, Mira Yurizaki said:

If you consider it programming, my first foray into something like it was messing around with the Starcraft map editor and trying to make story based missions like in the campaign.

Yeah, it's a good starting point. Game modding in general too. That is something I tried to do but failed miserably. Tried to mod STALKER games. C++ engine with an embedded Lua engine with logic, I couldn't figure things out to save my life back then  

[Nettly_]

My story started age 6 when I first learned Batch from YouTube tutorials

[Guest]

Robotics class in high school using C. 

Classmate told me of codecademy. I found out game design is a college degree & well... Unity was free & used JavaScript.