Growing up in the 90s, I watched my father work with computers in the US Air Force. In 2001 he gave my brothers and I an HTML book and stated that “With this and Notepad you can write your own websites”. We proceeded to tear that book apart and each of us had a web site on our Windows 98 SE computers that were networked together and thus had our sites linked together. Nothing spectacular but it was fun.

I wish now that I had spent more time on the javascript side of the book as I am still pretty weak with JS.

It’s a silly reason for my case. When I was like 11, I watched so many hacker movies and was like “damn this is cool, I want to be like them” so I dug through the path of “how to become a hacker” and saw that I need to know the program before trying to hack it. Tried learning C but failed because my monkey brain can’t handle all that. So I ended up writing random bash and python scripts since that time.

TI-83 graphing calculator in high school, around 1998. I would sit there in math class coding games in Basic. Ended up developing a reputation as the guy you went to if you needed a program to cheat on a math test.

The highlight of the entire endeavor was a class wherein the teacher announced that before a test, they’d be resetting the memory on everyone’s graphing calculators, to prevent cheating. I wasn’t planning to cheat, but I did have a few games I was working on, and I didn’t want to lose them, so I wrote a program that emulated the graphing calculator’s interface, and would let you go through all of the steps to reset the memory, including showing the Programs menu as being empty afterwards, while not actually resetting anything.

I showed this to the teacher just before the test (demonstrated “resetting the memory” with the program running, then demonstrated that the memory was in fact not reset), and he backed off from the compulsory reset policy in favor of the honor system, because he conceded that he wouldn’t be able to verify that the memory was actually reset anyway. Made me feel like an absolute hero.

It’s honestly funny because I learned the concepts in the math classes a lot better as a result of this - it took a very thorough understanding of how to use a concept to write a program to solve it for you.

In 2021, I had the same thought as you. Thought websites were cool so learned HTML, then the rest. Went to night college until about a week ago studying web dev and mobile dev.

I got recruited into a company about a year ago now (during college) and have been an employed Front-end developer ever since.

Necessity. I hate having to program, but there are many things I want or need that simply do not have a ready made solution. One example was writing a program to sync my off-brand RF controlled RGBW LED lights to the day/night cycle.

BASIC and eventually Z-80 asm on the Sinclair ZX-81. I didn’t have an assembler so I had to translate the instructions on paper and POKE them in by hand. I managed to write a screen scrolling routine this way. RAND USR 16514 and all that.

Some other Z-80 micros after that and then PCs and jumped on the Linux train pretty early on, been riding that since.

I started when I was 7 on an old Amstrad CPC464, together with a book teaching you BASIC. I mainly copy/pasted programs from the book until I learned some basics. It’s been programmer’s life ever since.

What a trajectory your life can take from one simple child’s enjoyment.

I’m still new to the space, though I’ve been dabbling for years now. I don’t really have a handle on any language yet. I feel like I’m still trying to wrap my head around the concepts fully and haven’t really done any real projects other than a simple Python program that was about 100 lines of code. I’ve dabbled in Java and HTML/CSS here and there as well.

Between life’s challenges with my own health and my family’s as well it’s tough to find time to learn. But I’m still endlessly fascinated.

Being able to actually develop the skill and become good enough at a language to get a job in the industry would probably be great for my family’s situation but it’s just so hard to get to that point.

I’m hopeful one day things will line up and I can finally call myself a programmer.

I started a WoW guild in 2007, and installed a basic phpbb forum. But that was too generic for my liking, and I had a grand vision of setting ourselves apart via an awesome website built off the back of the forum login system.

What was I going to do? Pay an expert to do a proper job? With my money?

So that’s how I got into PHP, and HTML /CSS, and everything since has just spiraled from there.

And yes, one of the first guild applications we got through my swanky new system failed because of an apostrophe. But this is how we learn!