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I am curious about the tech savvy patrons of The Midnight (which is likely many of us, though no trouble if one is not) about how they got into (web) development, computers, in general?
I started to learn web development in 2020. Since the late-90s I *wanted* to learn *something* with code, servers, and even the elusive "command line" I kept hearing about. I didn't know WHAT people were talking about, but I would graciously inform them that "you are smart" when they spoke of it, and that "I wish *I* knew what that stuff was". Well, I wasn't gonna stand courtside and play Techie Admirer forever, so I decided to pick up on the hobby/craft in 2020. Everyone was on lockdown due to COVID, and I was in quarantine, as well, with initial COVID.
For a while, on Write.as[/tmo], I had wanted to talk to people, exchange messages, and there was no comment system to speak of on W.a at that time. And I didn't want to make my e-mail public, so I slapped together a Carrd.co contact form called `Thanx.cc` and made the whole thing look Web-app-y. People asked me how they could create an account with "Thanx", and if it cost anything. Literally 9 out of 10 e-mail exchanges I had over a three month period (Jan-Mar 2020) mentioned how they liked Thanx. Being someone who always liked the "maker community" and "indie devs" and "digital nomads", etc, I knew a rule of thumb they all mention in regards to making a successful product - user vindication of the service. If no one wants to use it, it won't take off, so don't spend too much time on a project with no future. Thanx already had "user" (or e-mail sender" USEFULNESS "vindication", so I decided to go ahead and lease a Linode.com VPS and start trying "the web dev thing".
I still didn't know what a CLI was. I had never heard of SSH. I poked and proded the Linode Dashboard and Activity Settings and everywhere I could to find what (essentially) I thought would be a "theme editor" like some Tweeny bopper would utilize on Tumblr to paste in some HTML, but I didn't find such a section. I had to go to the CLI, the terminal on my Chromebox, via Linux (beta) apps on Chrome OS in order to "do stuff".
Ok, how? I had to get TO the VPS using "SSH". And then it was two days of researching SSH - what is it? What does it DO? Is it it's own software/company? Are there alternatives? What is the answer to life? etc. It's like I had to know the hieroglyphic epistemology of the actual LETTERS "S" "S" "H" in order to move forward. So I said "this is the thing that works, fxxx it let's go".
Then I was in like a Flint. I set my PW on Linode, and I was "IN" the VPS, but then wtf? I needed something to access files to write my newb-savvy "code" (basically copied HTML/CSS/ and some JS), so I had to find an editor. I settled for "nano editor", which I still use today, because it is straight forward, and began to put stuff in each "file/folder".
And on and on and on and on I learned and toiled until a year (or more?) later, I had a quasi functional web app (thanx.cc) with log-in capabilities (UN/PW/e-mail), as well as a landing "profile" page, and eventually digging in to .htaccess "ModRewrite" rules to have the handy dandy "thanx.cc/@username" feature, as to not have it be "thanx.cc/profiles/@username".
In the end, I scrapped Thanx.cc, itself, because I lost drive for THAT project, and just wanted to get to hosting open source software, and someday write something (complete) on my own.
Always learning though. Always having fun.
another coffee, ~bartender, and I hope all are well out there! :)
I started pretty young, maybe 8 or 9. My dad had a computer and a book about QBASIC lying around. With no idea what was going on, I copied the code in the book and ended up with a slot machine program. It was a confusing "draw the rest of the fucking owl" experience, but gave me confidence with computers that developed from there.
There was a patch where I hated it and wanted to un-learn everything, but since not doing it for work anymore I love it again and am grateful to know how to code.
I started in 1996. I knew before I had turned 18 that I wasn't likely to ever make a decent living as a musician or a writer, and I wanted a job that paid a hell of a lot better than sweeping floors and cleaning toilets. I had discovered that I had a minor talent for fucking around with computers in high school, so I decided to take advantage of it.
I'm not passionate about tech. TBH, I low-key think the Butlerian Jihad is a good idea. But the work still pays reasonably well so I keep doing it.
At university it dawned on me, that without knowledge of that new fangled computer stuff, future would be kind of hard. So I learned Pascal, Assembly, C along with some embedded programming (motorola 68k) and numerical simulation (hand crafted stuff in the realm of plasma physics). Since noone would write the programs I needed for my thesis (C, Fortran, perl) I had to do it myself. I'm still sailing on this stuff 25 years later, emacs, shell and all! On Linux, in case you wondered.
~bartender? A nice Scotch, please, and a toast to my emacs configuration:
; 1993-02-01 --- started with emacs
Cheers!
PS: At $dayjob I do systems integration. Create a bootloader, linux kernel, minimal userland for embedded "computers" plus everything needed to make the application feel at home.
~tatterdemalion wrote (thread):
I was given a Commodore VIC-20 when I was a kid. Nominally, I programmed in basic with it, but mainly I made character graphics, typed in games from magazines to play, and played cartridge games from a store that rented them.
My dad had an IBM PC he got for work, and I used it for school. I played some games on it, but it wasn't capable of much, even compared to the VIC-20. It had a 1200 baud modem, and by my senior year in high school, I was going on BBSes and the local university's public dialup telnet server, which I mainly used to telnet to MUDs.
In college I minored in CS, mainly because I had fallen in with a bad crowd of CS majors. Put OS/2 on my 386, played a lot of DOS games, was busy on Usenet just before/during the dawn of the WWW. Went to grad school in something completely different (anthropology), but was porting Unix programs to OS/2 as a hobby and eventually installing Linux. When I was done with classes, I moved so my spouse could go to grad school, got a job as a Linux sysadmin at a web hosting company, and dropped out of grad school.
Since then, I've moved from system administration with system automation coding into pure coding jobs, for a succession of public agencies. Doing web development in a couple of programming languages I don't particularly care for, on a platform that isn't Linux, but it's fine. Keeps a bright line between my work computing and hobby computing.
I got started on the path when I got told in elementary school that my handwriting was so awful that my only hope was to do everything on a computer. Then it was lego robotics, then in middle school it was using AppleScript on the school computers to annoy people, to switching my laptop to this thing I saw online called "linux" and never looked back.
Long story short, I just got promoted past the new-grad level at my software engineering job. (Backend though, I haven't done any frontend web-dev work since high school. I feel like I just don't have the aptitude or will for it.)
Thinking back on it, I also owe a lot to two particular computer teachers, one who gave an intro class that seemed to mainly be him, a computer person, teaching whatever he felt was important. Probably terrible as a "curriculum", but very helpful for getting a lot of the lingo and exposure to other things I didn't yet know (SQL and visual basic really stick out in my mind). Another who ran the AP class, let me T.A. and got me my first job as a CS Tutor.
I'm always curious how people go from computer users to computer people, so a very interesting post, thanks ~tffb!
My first attempts at programming were reading the blue and yellow C book in 7th grade. Setting up a C compiler proved too difficult for me, however, so that died quickly.
I took an AP Computer Science class in my junior year of high school. It was both fun and easy for me, which meant I got to play a lot of online TRON and Halo on the school netbooks while waiting for the rest of the class to catch up.
And, well, if something is both fun, and easy, and profitable as a career, it's pretty much a shoe-in for a college major and career. Self-discovery was not in the cards for me, in that regard.
I stepped on a rusty nail in my early 20s. When I came to from the delirium, I found I'd written several pages of what I soon enough learned was referred to as "8085 assembler".
It's been a downhill slide of hallucinations of curly-braced grandeur and awkward social missteps ever since....
:-)