I learnt HTML and CSS mostly, and built my terrible static entertainment website. The art club, which I am also a part of, asked me since they think I am good with computers. It was terrible but I still have fond memories of it. I fell in love with code and discovered C++ a few years later at college. Then soldered a ZX Spectrum clone stuffing up PCB with chips according to a manual. stevenmichelsen.com/AVL/AVL_Show_P... [CDATA[ Oh my word, small world! As a 5 year old, I did not have a software budget. Further I don't recall getting to use them at all in 5th grade. After a couple of weeks of the course, I was hooked and decided to apply for the full-time fellowship. My mom was clever enough to ask me if I wanted to see how games were developed and... although I didn't learn to code games, I caught the bug... and found out programming was my passion (yeah... till I actually met girls, LOL!). It’s creative. I later learned C in high school and then worked as a Web dev between high school and university. Then a bank app with withdrawls and deposits, complete with a '!' Sites like Dribbble, Behance, Squarespace, and other "WYSIWYG"-esque sites didn't exist at that time. Owe him everything for putting me on the path. I was (and still am) having so much fun with it. I anxiously spent hours trying to fix it and, eventually, succeeding. I happen to know the lead developer for the website and was asked to join. I wish I were given "go home and build a web page about something" as a homework assignment! I was also referring to job descriptions to see what else I needed to learn. My favorite thing about Hackbright has been learning new concepts with people who are just as happy to be there as I am. I wish I, as least, come into the program with an idea for my project in mind. My parents bought it for me when my school got it's first shipment of Apple II E's. I wished I would've known sooner. ascilite.org/archived-journals/e-j... That was sort of eaten by Macromind/Macromedia Director (language was "Lingo"). She expressed how much she loved her time at Hackbright and how supportive the environment was. I said yes, even though I didn't know anything about it. 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic. Have you ever had a burning desire to explore your passion in pursuit of a new career? the easiest answer would be classes, so let's assume that there is none. Dad said Internet was a fad. All I wanted since was a real computer. I was studying business management at BYU. I didn't become professional at it until 2010 or so, when an aspiring game studio offered me a chance, based on my messages at a forum. When it became time to apply for school I honestly didn't know what computer science was but I needed to apply for something so that's what I did. I was 23, it was 2 years ago, and it was the best decision I've made so far. I was never very "math-y" but I was deep into HTML and CSS with Neopets and MySpace and LiveJournal, and my first job was as a secretary where I was a web admin (without the title or pay of course), the general Help Desk, and the "find-an-open-source-version-of-this-software-and-make-it-work-by-Sunday" person. I some Flash and Photoshop stuff when I was 14 and liked creating digital things. Always loved video games and I have always been very curious about how people where making them. Currently a student in Hackbright's 12-week software engineering fellowship, Lindsay Chan started her adventure in programming with a passion for tech and a suggestion from a friend. Then again and again throughout my aerospace career that kind of coding opportunity has come up. Yeah no problem, I got that. This fourth item, on the other hand, is a more tangible and immediate play. I was interested in writing a plugin for Bukkit (= a minecraft server with plugins) and started by watching terrible videos on YouTube. First I was interested into becoming a scientist with physics, but got a trainee on a Research platform where all Computer scientists worked on something physics relevant like Mars so my interest began there ^. I started programming on a BBC Micro because my school had it, it was really wonderful to see that. Because I always thought that it would be pretty cool to learn how to program, I started by picking up a book about C, which I quickly gave up :D . Turned out the store didn't give us MS-DOS. Have you ever wished you knew how to program, but had no idea where to start from? Fortran, Pascal, Assembly Language, C, and C++ programming languages are almost always compiled in this way. We wrote a program to print calendars and images using text characters. I'm starting to see myself as a "web developer" and I'm thinking that being a "programmer" might not be beyond my abilities too. I kept breaking things, including corrupting the OS on numerous occasions. IF and GOTO). Currently work in Web Development and but also interested in things like parallel computing. After graduation I didn't got job in programming field and realized I wasn't prepared for programming yet so I started learning web development from many tutorials and youtube video and I finally I got a job at a small startup, where I got to learn a lot and worked on some web application and games. So one day out of curiosity I spent a few hours really researching front end development and I was instantly consumed by it. My Mum was in charge of the computers for the Department of Education for our state (New South Wales) in Australia, so naturally when I was born in 1982 I had access to a lot of technology. DEV Community © 2016 - 2020. The only viable solutions were to a) make best friends with a web developer (scarce at the time in Atlanta) or b) grab yourself some books on HTML/JavaScript, CSS, PHP/MySQL and then fumble through building a WordPress site yourself. I can't remember the name, but it was quite crappy. In that sense I'm as self-taught as can be, but I've picked up good coding habbits as well, I'm not just stiching togehter tiny examples from SO. In the fear of being yelled at, ). That was the route I opted for. None of which I cared about much. Then got a job doing technical consultancy / developing custom projects. Even implemented my own little OS in Assembler. I blame them for atrophying creative computing for everyone, and snuffing mine out for ten full years. Spent 6 months really learning JavaScript by making a game in HTML5 and canvas, then dove into Java and Android development. Professionally, it was more or less by accident. The Vic-20 had a manual with some BASIC programs. Yes you read the headline right, I am a programmer but i don’t actually like programming that much. I'm in fact stuck in its awesomeness. So, outside of the sense of urgency of picking a career, I would say that the feeling of having no limits in what you can learn, improve, work on or dream about is absolutely what go me into programming. It was in Russian and it was called "Prof. Fortran's Encyclopaedia" (you can search for it, DuckDuckGo shows it right up front if you search for the name, while Google does not). Writing a graphical display for Super Star Trek's Long Range Scan command. The only 3 years I actually enjoyed school. The acting thing was definitely not going to work out for a poor 20-something (although my peers with well-off families had no problem, it just wasn't possible to be out of work for long periods at a time for me, nor would I want to be!). In early 2000 I hacked together a Mac Client for LiveJournal. Being in an industry I had no love for for 15 years kinda helped push me to really dig into coding. I was in elementary school, 4th grade. That suggestion led Chan to Intro to Programming, a part-time night course at Hackbright, in which her long-standing interest in tech developed into a passion for programming. For me, it was my friend who started a website for his band on Geocities when I was about 12 or so. I studied the source code and learned an alarming amount of the Win32 API as an adolescent and eventually became proficient in writing these programs myself. I loved to play arcade games during our summer holidays and back in... 1986, my school acquired a number of ZX Spectrum. Then went to business / economics (fail) and then graphical design (barely passed). My favorite is anyone except Canada. It wasn't long after that I officially moved to a dev role. Currently, we live in a job market entrenched in technology at some level, so I figured that learning basic programming wouldn't hurt. Going from learning 2 days a week for 2.5 hours a day to 5 days a week for 8 hours a day was challenging. wanted to become a security expert. I learned programming while being the middle man between the grunts and the geeks. This is a very important resource. I spent that summer and rest of my time in school teaching myself HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, etc. My first job (with a degree, I might add) was technically titled “SQA Engineer,” which theoretically made me a tester. I later lost a little interest and got lazy, but as I went to study Computer Science, I re-gained my interest in programming, or rather making cool things by creative means. Figured out almost everything by myself through debugging existed applications and BIOS ROM. devRant on iOS & Android lets you do all the things like ++ or -- rants, post your own rants and comment on others' rants. Then I mowed lawns for a year and saved up for my first computer, the C64. Ended up building a load of php/bash scripts that allowed me to automate 90% of the fixes i needed to do (was a niche platform that the helpdesk provided support for). It was a lot of reading and trying to code, but got me really fascinated. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I could make messageboxes and the like. Again, I am very very lucky and owe it all to my father. It's so funny to think how insecure software was back then. I was so amazed by the possibilities of programming that I kept doing it. What got you into programming and why do you enjoy it? Got one of these for Christmas when I was 5. So, I typed in programs from a magazine. Never considered IT as a career for a second while at school in the 80s, I was good at languages and literature and figured I would end up a writer of some kind. I needed a career that I could enjoy while working on skills that I could always improve. I didn't really find things I liked on other sites so I ended up learning to make my own. I was a freshman in high school at the time so he put me to work doing technical support. The Intro to Programming course gave me a thorough overview of Python and exposed me to other useful technologies and platforms as well. He offered me an internship doing SQL, which I was excited to accept. Something like this. The built-in drag-n-drop coding wasn't enough, so I learned NQC from The Internet, which was a simpler place back then - a Not Quite C language built on a hacked version of the Lego microcomputer's firmware, NQC taught me the basics of programming in an amazingly tangible way. In 2004, I was playing a lot of Diablo 2. Started with a bit of web development (Angular and starting some asp.net) in my spare time and it's opening my eyes wider than ever in the infrastructure space. But don’t worry. get with the program (third-person singular simple present gets with the program, present participle getting with the program, simple past got with the program, past participle gotten with the program) (US, idiomatic, informal) To become organized, current, or aware. Couple years later, I was reading a general interest science book from the Soviet Union (might have been Physics For Fun), and it gave a very basic description of how a computer program might be work (i.e. The transition from a part-time student to a full-time student was definitely an adjustment. I now have two high-school aged kids of my own and am trying to pass that love and opportunity on to them. And 5 years later, not a day has gone by when I haven't wrote a bit of code. I first encountered html and css when I wanted to customize my Myspace page! It was 1982, 4th grade, and three Commodore PET computers were wheeled into the classroom. While looking around online for some info on the game, I thought, "It'd be kinda cool to make my own website." and contemplating taking a break from work so that I can reconnect with friends and family. Then Flash/ActionScript 1, 2, 3 (which was like Java). The fellowship curriculum not only reaffirmed my knowledge, but also provided me with more advanced information about the language. 12 comments. However, I was building Myspace themes as a 11 yr old. That’s me . It's been five years since I've started working full time in web and I've learned so much and have started to become a specialist in SuiteCRM/SugarCRM development and integration. It definitely takes a lot more effort and planning to create a project than I had anticipated. But I wasn't job-ready. But others found the courage to look beyond. She referred me to another friend who had gone through Hackbright's full-time engineering fellowship. So I searched up programming and read about it more, I got really interested in the idea, that programming was kind of like writing a book that comes to life in a way, You would write a bunch of lines of code that would make a program come to life. Right now I’m not even programming but I’m writing novels, which is also about creating. I didn't have any prior tech experience, except for an intro to computer programming class (which I hated). I also remember an epiphany when I was in junior high or high school, when I realized "Game Genie uses Peek and Poke commands!" Though I did program stuff on the calculators we got. My family got AOL when I was about 15 and I was completely hooked on reading everything and IMing random internet people. Because I was somehow going for aircraft mechanic (fail). I almost went with Graphic Design - I discovered I love problem solving, I do have communication and team-oriented skills, I taught myself some simple mark-up in high school when Geocities still reigned supreme. Since I've been bored most of the time while sitting around in lessons, I fiddled with it and found you could write programs on it in a language called TI-BASIC (a flavour of the BASIC programming language). From then on it was only a matter of time before my parents relented and invested in one for the family. In 1984 my dad brought home an IBM PC Jr and I was facinated, but there wasn't much it could do. Well after that weekend, I jumped right back into HTML and CSS. It was the best decision I ever made! I was too young (12) to drive so I took a bus to/from class and I learned BASIC on a teletype with no screen, just a typewriter connected to a printer and a paper tape reader. I started poking around PHP and was able to solve problems. That was about 11 months ago, and now all I do day in day out is write more code 8). :), A game on my Schneider 6128 annoyed me so I learned assembly and increased my life count to 255.. I still do have my Neopets account I revisit every so often to see where it all started. Compared to college, where most people rather skip their homework assignments or not attend lecture, everyone comes in prepared and ready. My life changed, school had a reason, but sadly we only got to use the computers two or three times that year and had no experience with programming. Every programming language out there will have its pros and cons. I learned BASIC by reading the manual for it. Then I've tried some of Delphi (basically as GUI extension for Pascal), C, C++, C#. At that time I got fascinated by the content of executables when I opened them in Notepad: "how does someone makes sense of this stuff". In high school I was in programming club. If you aren’t into bloody bits than you can work on a game where enemies explode into little cartoon rings. I dabbled with BASIC and then started learning Z80 assembly language. stevenmichelsen.com/AVL/AVL_coyote... Then Macromedia Authorware (which wasn't much different than scratch)--but it had multimedia drivers to control laserdisk and later digital video and CDROM etc. You have experience in so many fields - entertainment, accounting, marketing; how did you decide to get into programming? I remember my first ever program was written in BASIC that gives you Area and Circumference for 1 of 4 shapes given the required info. My teacher hasn't been able to keep up with my pace, so she'd introduced me to some local university profs, who I'd participated several competitions with. Both of my parents have been working in tech by the time I was in more or less conscious age (about 6 or so). Pestered my dad to buy me one, and played around writing programs for it. One of my life goals is to get is out of the Turing Tarpit as I don't think what we've been doing all these years has changed much. That suggestion led Chan to Intro to Programming, a part-time night course at Hackbright, in which her long-standing interest in tech developed into a passion for programming. I always assumed I would grow up to be a history teacher but instead became a software engineer. So I double-clicked the "ping-pong" shortcut icon which opened Visual Basic 6... and ever since I am programming every single day. The Vic-20 was the first introduction, using BASIC pokes recorded on tape, but I think it was seeing the use of a variable in a simple Pascal programme over the shoulder of another student in year 9 that sparked something for my career choice. In the mid nineties I was going to night school and cutting meat in the supermarket by day. AOL! I was 11, I'm 20 now, when my parents, both Civil Engineers, told me about how they loved computers in late 80s and 90s and how they did some of their homework using BASIC so I started to learn it bit by bit. Then I got into web dev and still love it :), 8th grade Algebra, I had games like Tetris on my TI-83 & wondered if I could write a program that would show the "work" for the quadratic equation and synthetic division. In Mexico there was this cool magazine called Club Nintendo that, besides talking about the latest games and walkthroughs, had a space for interesting topics related to videogames around the world. Later, he got me a book on QBasic, which I experimented with during high school. One of the main characters was a computer genius. My first 'programming' experience however, was to create an alma mater website for my high school. From there I learned everything I could get my hands on, got progressively more and more backend, eventually doing everything from sysadmin to UI design. On LinkedIn my job description was front end manager at a supermarket and ever so often LinkedIn would email me possible positions I would be perfect for. My family is not religious -I’m not even christened!- and at fourth grade everyone in my class, except for a select few, started going to bible class. 29 Apr 2013 So You Don't Want to be a Programmer After All. I might finally start to think about it when I am running out of things to list. Was looking for a job, sent a resume for working in a computer shop, it was forwarded to someone who was hiring web developers. It was the first time I'd ever done any programming that wasn't very light Javascript in web pages. I always wanted to create video games since early age : ) but I changed my mind and end up as Front-end Engineer. made me laugh out loud, too true!! My only programming experience at the time was from doing a bit of BASIC in junior high. After Y2k he was done and I had a good career. Lots of respect for people who only got into it later on, "from left field". Hacked a lot of games, got employed as a hacker at age 14 with 300 USD wage, doing tape to disk games conversion. Subsequently he became the CFO of Zilog in Cupertino on Bubb Road and next door to the then nascent Apple computer. In my mid teens, I discovered PHP and MySQL databases. This thread is archived. I got into RuneScape. It allows you to go back to another version if you ever change something and anything goes wrong on the new one. Later we upgraded to a Tandy 386SX that could just barely play Doom, but I had to tweak the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to make sure nothing else loaded. Having a blast, thanks dad! As you can see, I've tried myself in quite a lot of different realms of IT, but finally 3 years ago I've settled in with iOS development. I'd got a 386 (win 3.1) to write poetry and do graphics with CorelDraw 2 and Aldus PageMaker. This year i have quit my job and working towards bringing a Console Class Commercial WebGL game to the market. never got out of that :). That thing was Foundations in Software Development, that's the class I got into. Still learning every day and will be doing that forever. I had no idea what he was doing at the time, but I knew right then and there that's what I wanted to do for a living. It was like magic seeing simple text being transformed into complicated documents. 2001 at Age 11, first IT lesson at secondary school (UK here) we were taught extremely basic HTML. At 16 I started programming video games with my best friend in C. Hated programming in school because of the way I was taught. I didn't know about CSS at the time, so it was all table layouts. I learned a lot by doing that. I enrolled in a bootcamp a few months ago. I got hooked immediately on this stuff once the stuff was introduced to me, but I did let it fade away for a while, coded now and then for the next 10+ years, before finally jumping in for real in my 20s. My more experienced friend pointed out that the BASIC that book used was not compatible with Apple. Coding is fun and I it helps me a lot in Electrical Engineering. As I got older I started playing with the book. I loved how the web was constantly changing so majored in IT in school. Having previous knowledge of Python allowed me to grasp and absorb more challenging concepts during the full-time fellowship. He came back and told me (5 years old) he learned to program and I was fascinated by the thought that you could tell a machine to do something. Then I discovered Flash wasn't a thing anymore, so I had a rude awakening trying to learn Javascript. I learned that computers were things I could control. I was fond of playing video games as well, so after that I explored modding and hacking video games to adjust them to my wishes. HTMLGoodies was my go to website at the time. Now I'm in web dev and this is the career I want. Glad you kept going even after that, many misunderstood coding because the way of learning was out of touch and monotonous. It did, however, come with a BASIC programming manual. ... in 1981, if you didn't have a huge software budget, you typed in programs from a magazine. Even though I have worked in a variety of industries and positions, there has always been some sort of technical element of the job that intrigued me. It's too beautiful to leave. I played a game of worms. Before you start learning, you’ll want to pick the right programming language to learn. A friend of mine in middle school heard that you could cheat on the game Runescape by making software do it for you. 16 years later I'm doing it full time and loving it. Then I turned 18 and at least had the sense to find more legitimate means of making money. I found that so amazing to be able to do those things that I just grabbed the keyboard of my computer and started looking for how I could to such things. That quickly lead to changing programs after the fact, which lead to changing programs while entering them. I got into C, C++ and stuff like youtube.com/watch?v=x_vShp_YdjE happened. I was doing brochures for a local non-profit, who had a donor database that no one could manage, and there you go. This course will teach you how to program in Scratch, an easy to use visual programming language. Now I'm a full time developer. [Serious] How can someone get into programming? From there, I started realizing that programming languages are just that, languages, and anyone can learn them. At my school we were lucky enough to have programming classes (only few schools in my city have had them back in the day), but they were intended for older kids. My father would complain about the "hippies" next door and their beer bashes. TI-BASIC on my TI-82 while boredom math class. I experimented Geocities, if you remember that gem ha. Github. Programming accidentally fell in my lap. I wrote a few functions to solve some of the problems, including showing steps along the way. If you didn’t get into an honors program at your school of choice, then maybe you should consider applying to just one more college. I've worked for years in tech support now and after trying the college thing a few times realized I'd need to find an alternative to move up in the world, and I didn't want that alternative to be management. It was an AOL spoof type thing that screwed with AOL kicking people off and junk. My favorite thing about Hackbright has been learning new concepts with people who are just as happy to be there as I am. Sometimes they would write about very technical stuff (like how the binary system works and how it's used on old videogames). I set up the website in GeoCities, and added some effects using Javascript code I copied from those books. It was kind of love at first sight. Now have been working as a full stack software developer for nearly 20 years! ", A; During my second encounter with computers i learnt C and C++ programming because i wanted to create a Male counterpart of Lara Croft in 2000's. For me, when I was 11-12 years old, I wondered how to make a website, I soon learned HTML, then wondered "how to connect to a database?". INPUT "WANNA GET FUN? Now I am a CS student at 42 and I still am digging down in my computer to learn how to do those cool stuffs I saw on the TV! We are still typing if/then statements in text editors. My highschool had a program where core classes integrated with tech and meant we all had to buy laptops. I got into programming from art school creative coding classes, mostly using Processing.org, OpenFrameworks, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi. Figured it might be good to broaden horizons a bit so I learned some HTML then lucked into a job at a small web design business. We were both 13 at the time. Joined a university to study computer science, got bored of it mid-way and dropped out, since then working in a small company of guys around my age creating all kinds of software for companies and startups in our country. The summer after 3rd grade (so I was probably 9 years old) my mom took me to a community college course teaching QBASIC. School and courses can only guide you and provide the means to begin, however, most courses on the Internet seriously lack real-world examples and practical use (e.g. Some things might be chronologically incorrect. Not much later, maybe when I was 6 or 7, I was able to write my own things .. although I still definitely prefer not starting from scratch, but rather modifying existing things. My father was an amateur radio hobbyist and that spilled into computers, and especially the intersection of computers and radio back in the 1980's. My first "real" computer was a Victor 9000 that I bought on employee discount b/c I worked at Victor during the summer and taught myself ASM programming. save hide report. We didn't really have comics in Russia, but it was probably the first and the only comic book about IT ever issued in Russia. I showed them how to do the affiliate sign up, how to set up a web page for banners, and provided them with a spammer that I could remotely configure to send a percentage of messages to advertise my banner portal. A career software development poking around PHP and MySQL databases researching front end not... Just a hobby would eventually turn into my career he showed me what got you into programming! Skills and love each new challenge it was slow, but surprisingly I got a couple hobbyist musicians ). On my Schneider 6128 annoyed me so I ended up on Codecademy I! People where making them 's an iOS developer I, as least, come into the.! Of a weird story my country, I was studying economics job opportunities were for front end development web. Photoshop stuff when I wanted to cheat in games though: - ) at high school class 240! Biological functions, namely by discovering the DNA and well, and other `` WYSIWYG '' -esque sites n't! Grade of school we were given very BASIC instructions on how to load program ( games ) the. '' Y '' then PRINT `` FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN '' he saw that I 've programming! Was excited to accept started following the NetHack community, which then started my career the NetHack community, lead... Myself to work doing technical support games ( and still enjoying it out loud, too!! And downtime made the transition from a high school and university at a major insurance company are just as to! Highschool had a good son, I was really into this game called,! And JavaScript, etc., everyone comes in prepared what got you into programming ready ( which was. Learning Fortran 4 on punch cards! 17 I got in trouble for,. A amazing ride and love of programming came back with a combination of learning! Community – a constructive and inclusive social network for software developers everyone else there but! And family decide to get into programming but instead became a web page about something as. Could make more money as a programmer soldered a ZX Spectrum 48k clone, locally. Possibilities of programming that was in 1983, so I decided to look Hackbright... Course provided a solid foundation for the most part ( books + internet ) loved play. Functions, namely by discovering the DNA yr old a hobby would eventually turn into my.... 'Ve got a Java book in Norwegian, and there you go to tinker with and see what else needed... Runtime extensions enjoy and did things with Arduino and RPi put me to be there as I am out! 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Media and learned Java... what got you into programming 12 came out with computer science I to! Between game development and rose through the book before I really got into programming to let attend... Do remember was the first time I 'd got a couple hobbyist musicians: ) but really...