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Top comments (51)
First time: My friend Mike was making a Geocities website for his band. We were ~12 and I got hooked pretty quickly on the magic of building websites.
Despite that I kind of stopped doing it. I took some CS classes and didn't do very well and sort of thought real programming wasn't for me.
Luckily I got motivated again after college by how lame my job prospects seemed and how much I really wanted to make things. I decided I was going to go all in on coding and haven't looked back since.
I have a similar path like you Ben, we might have been related in our previous lives.
Built my first website in Highschool, went to University to study Economics.
At the last year of my studies started learning to code on codecademy.com for fun.
Became an accountant, worked for 2 months, quit that boring job and went all in into coding.
BEST DECISION EVAAAA
Yeah that is so similar to my experience.
I'm still a student in school, so my journey isn't as exciting as everyone else's, haha. Ever since I was younger, I was curious as to how a computer was able to do so many cool things - like games, websites and operating systems. (... 6-year-old me tried to make an "operating system" in PowerPoint)
As soon as Computer Science was available for me to do at school, I leapt at the opportunity and started learning in September 2015. In January 2016, I was introduced to web development at school and I've been obsessed with code ever since.
In a nutshell: learning at school got me started. But personal curiousity has always had me interested in how a computer does "things", and the ability to take any idea and bring it to life with code keeps me interested in development and hopefully, some day, I'm doing it as a career. :D
Wow Dylan π»
Didn't had money to buy my girlfriend a present for a birthday, so within 3 months I figured out how to build a website for her.
Somehow people liked her website a lot. So people started asking me to built one for them too...
When I was around 10 years old, my uncle Klaus showed me how to write a BASIC program on my C16. I remember it calculated a random number, and changed the background color based on it, and emitted random noise. I was fascinated, and started to play around with BASIC a little bit.
When I was around 12 years old, my parents bought me a Commodore Amiga 500. A wonderful machine, with its Blitter graphics chip more powerful than any PC at that time. I self taught assembler language from books, then became part of the so-called "Amiga demo scene". Many small teams competed to showcase the amazing graphics and sound features of the Amigas.
I guess today you would call these kid teams "cross-functional".
I studied computer science later on, but the passion for programming started in my youth.
A friend of mine wanted me to try web development, and I tried the freeCodeCamp program and because of some problems in real life, I stopped.
2 Years later he came again with a bunch of e-books and tutorials and said man you gotta do this I know you can, give it a try :D
In the end, I did some work, I saw that I am proceeding so I continued to do more and more :D
All it was needed was another try and a great support, since then I never stopped :D
I entered college with EE (Electrical Engineering) in mind.
After one semester, I thought it wasn't for me as it was hard to get an access electronic equipment whenever I wanted to.
I was also taking a programming course and was readily available 24 hours as all I had to do was to connect to a remote server.
And what got me hooked was that feedback was immediate.
All EE course labs lasted hours or even days.
When I was able to light a light bulb after 4 hours of designing and messing around with breadboard, I was like, that's it. I am going CS.
Confession: I was more into practical side of programming so was pretty bad at academic theoretical topics.
Intro to programming, first year of uni. Learned basic console IO in C. So instead of writing out all my budgetting info every few weeks I wrote a program which asks for some info then spits out how much coffee I can afford per week. That basic program made me realize how programming knowledge is a powerful tool which can be applied to so many things. Then I made battleship.
My first time programming was actually as part of a GIS class that focused on ArcGIS. The teacher I had was a huge fan of outside-the-box teaching methods and he would teach us GIS stuff using Visual Basic.
We only did things like placing an ImageView on a form with a Button that would change the image between two jpegs, but it was life-changing.
After that year (10th grade), I took all the classes with that teacher I could the following two years of high school and fell in love with programming. I then went on to a University in Arkansas and got my bachelor's.
That said, I honestly believe I learned most of my programming abilities by just building random tools to make my life easier or entertain myself. Instead of learning from a book, I found it a million times easier to put pieces together until my shotty fort turned into some more respectable code.
I couldn't say what my exact start was. I used to create websites with Angelfire and Geocities, following tutorials from sites like Funky Chicken's HTML help to create simple effects like marquees.
Eventually I started making skins/themes for message board software like Invision, phpBB, and vBulletin. At first they were simple re-colors, but quickly I started altering the HTML/CSS to move or alter elements.
My first foray into a "software" language was JS, using it to add unimaginable stuff to the site -- like an anime character that followed the cursor and led your around the site. I also got into PHP around the same time using it to create a templating system for my website (using
includefor the header/footer/sidebar). It was way better than iFrames, and I never looked back πI remember hiring books out from the library in my early teens and entering the code listing for BASIC programs, usually games, in to the computer we had at the time - a 386 I believe - and then altering them to see what happened.
In my later teens a friend gave me the floppy disks for Visual Basic 4 as his uncle no longer needed them, and I remember trying to re-create the game Chips Challenge.
At the end of high school I decided I wanted to do "something" with computers, but not what exactly, so did a 1 year course that gave me a taste of everything computer related from programming, databases, web development, multimedia, networking, hardware etc.
From there I decided I really liked programming and databases so did a course specifically on software engineering.