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.
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.
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.
I wanted to make videogames. I made videogames on my graphing calculator between classes.
A pain, but rewarding 😄 I remember having a mario clone
Working through the logic is fun
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 ;)
Thought it was the best way to meet hot guys
That got a chuckle. Genuinely curious, how’d that work out for you?
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.
When I started with computers, the cheapest way to get software was to buy a computer magazine which published software as printed source code. Yes, you had to type page after page from that listing to get a game or utility running. On top of that, I had NO means of saving such a program - it took some time until I could afford the cable to attach a cassette recorder as a storage device.
So I got quite good at two skills early on: Typing fast - and debugging. I basically learned debugging code before I really knew how to program.
And how did I get into coding? I remember the first attempt of understanding code was to find out: “How do I get more than three lives in this game?”
And from there it went to re-creating the games I’ve seen on the coin-swallowing machine at the mall that I could not afford to play, but liked to watch.
Since then, I’ve done about everything, from industrial controlles for elevators to AI, from compilers to operating systems, text processor, database systems (before there was SQL), ERPs, and now I do embedded systems and FPGAs.
I’ve probably forgotten more programming languages than todays newbies can list…
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 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.
I always liked doing puzzles and then realised that people got paid for solving them.
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.
I’m a little old.
I liked video games as a very young child. Naturally I wanted to make my own.
We didn’t have the Internet because this was the early 90s, and my parents didn’t think it was worth the hassle.
The computer we had did have BASIC on it , and it had some help files. I think I got a book from the library, too, but I was too young to really do well with books written for adults. I made some progress making some games, mostly text adventure style, but they were incomplete and messy like you’d expect from a kid. A kid with no Internet to look things up on, too.
High school had some programming classes. They were pretty okay.
Then in college I hit the trope where the smart kid who never had to study finally hits difficult material and doesn’t know what to do. Woops.
Honestly, it’s because a bunch of programs i used disappointed me (performance, functionality, [being a web app at all], etc.) and i figured it couldnt be that hard to do it better. In some cases i was right, in most i was wrong. As it turns out though, I really like programming so i guess i’m stuck here
