~
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....
:-)