To give some context, I’m a developer myself and once I had a conversation with someone who has not “tasted” programming, but was wondering about passion and career. I was asked what I like about programming. My answer was that my interest in it came from writing small scripts when I was young to automate things.
Aside from being a career, I’m curious what got you into coding ?
The fact that debug cycles are fast. I started out working in nanotechnology, and spending 3-4 days of fabrication -> electron microscope -> optical verification was soul crushing cause 99.9% of the work never led to anything and you practically never knew why.
Software development is logical and predictable. It’s (relatively) easy to break a large task down into small ones, prove to yourself that they will work, and compose them together to complete a large project. Sure, things go wrong here and there, but for the most part, you can be confident that whatever you’re doing should work every step of the way… without having to worry that you committed some irrecoverable error at any step in the process.
Programming class at school when I was 15. Basic Delphi/object pascal back then. Was always into technology beforehand, especially tinkering with the first android phones, rooting them and installing custom ROMs
My middle school algebra teacher sparked my interest in coding.
Due to moving around a lot, I never learned any mathematics, not even basic arithmetic before middle school. In the seventh grade, I was put in a class where the teacher just handed out worksheets with arithmetic problems, and then usually left the classroom until the end of the hour. On the rare occasions when she stayed, I asked her to teach me arithmetic, but she didn’t believe I couldn’t do it, so she never taught me and I failed the class.
But in the eighth or ninth grade, they allowed me to sign up for the Algebra for dummies class, which taught in two semesters what the normal class taught in one. My new teacher taught me arithmetic the first day, and I was his star pupil from that point.
He invited me and some other students to stay after school to learn FORTRAN. We did not have a computer at the middle school–it was at the university. We didn’t even have a card punching machine. So we had cards that looked like punch cards, but instead of punching holes in them, we coded the Hollerith code in them by filling bubbles with a number 2 pencil. Then we sent the cards on a mail truck to the university and got back a printout a week later.
For me it was about web developing (front-end),
when I was a teenager I tried learning Python, but it was more about math and stuff I never find them amazing back then, but few years later I saw a video about html, WOW, it was mind blowing, I can create a website!!! after a while I made a simple php app and connected it to a Mysql DB, good old days.
I think I was 11 or 12 when I started plaxing Tibia (a very early MMORPG). I really enjoyed it. At some point I found out that somebody has leaked the source code. You could host your own Tibia server. You could create new map segments or introduce new quests by Lua scripting. There was a huge community for “Open Tibia”, hundreds of servers with thousands of players. First, I got into mapping, then I got into scripting and loved it.
My introduction or what got me intrested was Farming Simulator 2009 when I was 10.
The game had amazing mod support and I found out that each mod, like a new tractor, had a modDesc.xml file in it that contained values like in-game price, name of the tractor, fuel tank volume, … .And I found out that changing these values would change these values in game, which made me feel like an absolute hackerman.
It wasn’t the money, it was the ostracizing. I was bullied mercilessly for years and my only retreat was the inside. Computers were the most entertaining thing, so spending a lot of time on it, made me good at it.
Nobody knows what I sound like, smell like, look like, etc. online. I could delete this account right now and pop up with a new one - to anybody but the admins, it’d be like a new person showed up. Also: I can leave whenever I like.
Semi-related: opensource is great too. If something doesn’t work, I can try and fix it. If the maintainer(s) doesn’t want it/can’t integrate it, a new fork can be created (soft or hard).
Finally, it’s cheap. No need to buy expensive equipment, materials, space, pay teachers, or have a team.
I was 7 and I found a booklet for BASIC programming language that came with my C64. I was fucking ecstatic that I could just write words and make computer go brrrr. My first project was my school schedule in a form of a table created with n number of print statements. I felt like a fucking wizard.
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Hacking early shareware to unlock features because I didn’t have money.
Wait… That’s still about money. Uh… Puzzles.
Seeing my dad show my mom a demo he’d written in assembly on the C-64.
fuboand I might be the same person. I should keep better track of my accounts. /sBut seriously, same here. That C64… There was never anything quite like it before. I still get happy goosebumps when I see the word
READY.The worst teacher I ever had assigned me a project to make a game using GameMaker. Been hooked ever since, and eventually turned it into a career.
Did your opinion of the teacher change at all after that?
The fact that debug cycles are fast. I started out working in nanotechnology, and spending 3-4 days of fabrication -> electron microscope -> optical verification was soul crushing cause 99.9% of the work never led to anything and you practically never knew why.
Software development is logical and predictable. It’s (relatively) easy to break a large task down into small ones, prove to yourself that they will work, and compose them together to complete a large project. Sure, things go wrong here and there, but for the most part, you can be confident that whatever you’re doing should work every step of the way… without having to worry that you committed some irrecoverable error at any step in the process.
Beats doing tedious shit by hand and knowing you’re gonna fuck it up.
Now I do convoluted shit by hand and not knowing I’m gonna fuck it up ;)
Working through the logic is fun
This right here. Puzzles are fun to solve and I like the challenge of designing systems for different needs.
Programming class at school when I was 15. Basic Delphi/object pascal back then. Was always into technology beforehand, especially tinkering with the first android phones, rooting them and installing custom ROMs
My middle school algebra teacher sparked my interest in coding.
Due to moving around a lot, I never learned any mathematics, not even basic arithmetic before middle school. In the seventh grade, I was put in a class where the teacher just handed out worksheets with arithmetic problems, and then usually left the classroom until the end of the hour. On the rare occasions when she stayed, I asked her to teach me arithmetic, but she didn’t believe I couldn’t do it, so she never taught me and I failed the class.
But in the eighth or ninth grade, they allowed me to sign up for the Algebra for dummies class, which taught in two semesters what the normal class taught in one. My new teacher taught me arithmetic the first day, and I was his star pupil from that point.
He invited me and some other students to stay after school to learn FORTRAN. We did not have a computer at the middle school–it was at the university. We didn’t even have a card punching machine. So we had cards that looked like punch cards, but instead of punching holes in them, we coded the Hollerith code in them by filling bubbles with a number 2 pencil. Then we sent the cards on a mail truck to the university and got back a printout a week later.
For me it was about web developing (front-end), when I was a teenager I tried learning Python, but it was more about math and stuff I never find them amazing back then, but few years later I saw a video about html, WOW, it was mind blowing, I can create a website!!! after a while I made a simple php app and connected it to a Mysql DB, good old days.
I think I was 11 or 12 when I started plaxing Tibia (a very early MMORPG). I really enjoyed it. At some point I found out that somebody has leaked the source code. You could host your own Tibia server. You could create new map segments or introduce new quests by Lua scripting. There was a huge community for “Open Tibia”, hundreds of servers with thousands of players. First, I got into mapping, then I got into scripting and loved it.
My introduction or what got me intrested was Farming Simulator 2009 when I was 10.
The game had amazing mod support and I found out that each mod, like a new tractor, had a modDesc.xml file in it that contained values like in-game price, name of the tractor, fuel tank volume, … .And I found out that changing these values would change these values in game, which made me feel like an absolute hackerman.
It wasn’t the money, it was the ostracizing. I was bullied mercilessly for years and my only retreat was the inside. Computers were the most entertaining thing, so spending a lot of time on it, made me good at it.
Nobody knows what I sound like, smell like, look like, etc. online. I could delete this account right now and pop up with a new one - to anybody but the admins, it’d be like a new person showed up. Also: I can leave whenever I like.
Semi-related: opensource is great too. If something doesn’t work, I can try and fix it. If the maintainer(s) doesn’t want it/can’t integrate it, a new fork can be created (soft or hard).
Finally, it’s cheap. No need to buy expensive equipment, materials, space, pay teachers, or have a team.
I studied chemical engineering in university, but I realized it wasn’t what I hoped.
What I hoped: sitting at a desk, drawing schematics, crunching numbers, designing chemical plants, coming up with smart ideas, etc.
What it actually was: walking around a chemical plant or factory and managing plant operators (they knew way more than I did).
It turns out programming is exactly what I hoped from chemical engineering. I love solving problems from the comfort of a desk.
Math was always my favorite subject in school, and it seems programming is a type of applied maths.
I’m bad at everything else.
I was 7 and I found a booklet for BASIC programming language that came with my C64. I was fucking ecstatic that I could just write words and make computer go brrrr. My first project was my school schedule in a form of a table created with n number of print statements. I felt like a fucking wizard.