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 ?
I tried to write a game. The game wasn’t fun, but programming kept mashing the “I created something” reward button in my head, so I kept doing it.
I wanted to make videogames. I made videogames on my graphing calculator between classes.
A pain, but rewarding 😄 I remember having a mario clone
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.
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.
Thought it was the best way to meet hot guys
That got a chuckle. Genuinely curious, how’d that work out for you?
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.
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 ;)
I loved (and still do) the rush of solving the puzzle. Programming languages give you a constrained set of rules to express yourself with. And yet we know that you can create literally anything with those rules if you can just put them together in the right way.
I love when a program actually comes together and it works for the first time! When I’ve started from nothing but a vague desire and then pulled a solution from out of the void. It’s as close to actual magic as anything else I can think of.
I compel lightning and stone to my will, commanding them in unspoken tongues.
I saw a lot of software and in my stubbornness I thought “that’s awfully designed, I can do better than this.”
This was me too - I wanted to do things my computer couldn’t do, and so I figured out how to make it happen. Absolutely the best way to learn in my opinion and so much easier today than it was when I learned.
Then my dad’s friend needed some software and I knew how to do that… so I did. It was fun, and at the end he was like “so how much do I owe you?” and I was like “what? I have no idea. Didn’t expect to get paid”. He gave me a few hundred bucks and I did a few more small projects along those lines, and a bunch of open source work, before getting a job as a junior developer.
Been doing it for over 20 years now - money was never the goal, but I do earn a decent living thankfully.
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.
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.
I liked computers in general since highschool, felt natural.
Didn’t think that much about the money there or now and IT is slowly becoming bluecolar anyway.
When I first got daily access to internet (back in 2009), I got curious about how programs are built. Like, if I wanted to make my own application, what should I do?
I googled something along that direction and it linked me to a famous french website for learning programming (site du zéro) where I learnt C language.
After the course I made a 2D Snake game with SDL2. How naive was I to think I could write it in one go without testing anything in between! I scrapped the 1st attempt because it was a disaster and randomly inserting/removing
*was not helping.I started again from scratch, testing in smaller steps, and I really liked it. After a couple of weeks I had my Snake game working! I was so proud of it that I showed it to my mom. I do not have the source files anymore but I still have the binary somewhere
Afterwards I sticked with it and continued programming - I was back in school without much access to internet so I programmed on my TI-83+ instead. Eventually I pursued computer science studies then a PhD… It got me hooked real good.
similar story here, just that little me wrote his snake program with windows forms because that was all I knew. Every element of the game was a button. I remember the first versions beeing so inefficient (rebuilding the whole UI that was made of loads of small buttons every few milliseconds) that my Intel core 2 duo couldn’t run it properly. Good times.
December 8th, 2009 - Motorola Droid successfully rooted … [granting] root access on the phone using a terminal emulator. This is how I learned bash which inevitably pushed me into pursuing proper Computer Science.
Software is often terrible and the only person who was going to fix it was myself. Of course that was only possible because I enjoyed the type of logic puzzles that entailed. I also found community within a few software projects that motivated me.
