I was apparently enraptured by PCs as a child, didn’t really do much apart from games / emulators until secondary school. At ~14 I was offered an extracurricular class to learn how to program TI-82 calculators. This really clicked for me, ended up pursuing a heavy math / comp sci / stem curriculum. I get to automate away tedious / boring tasks by working on a mentally stimulating puzzle. The rush on getting it working the first time is 👌
The rush on getting it working the first time is 👌
That’s so true, but what I think keeps us hooked in the game are the failures, the figuring out the "why"s.
I do test automation, getting a particularly difficult test scenario working in automation is 🤌
Definitely video games and wanting to make mods. Started off “making mods” in TorqueScript (I believe it was called?) when I was in middle school.
Reading as a kid about virus analysis and how they work in a short column in a… newspaper. Yeah, they even listed full Windows Registry paths. Didn’t know what HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE was, didn’t own a computer, only knew about some DOS commands, but I knew I wanted to be able to do that job and decompile stuff (whatever that ment) and see how it worked. Just like dismantling (and ultimately destroying) toys to see the inner workings.
After finally owning a computer and being bored by the few games I had on Windows 95, being limited to Notepad, Internet Explorer (without an internet connection yet; or was it Netscape Navigator?) and Paint (in which I sucked, lacking any artistic talent), when I learned that I can just type stuff in Notepad, I borrowed a book about “programming” in HTML. Then Pascal, the pinnacle being a simple XOR encryption program, with a god damn white on blue “windows” interface with buttons (a la Midnight Commander). Writing TRIVIA “scripts” for mIRC channels made us gods. Then Delphi naturally followed, making my own tool to track how many hours I’ve spent on dialup a month (yes, internet was very expensive) while listening to 80’s music on Winamp. Nothing was more interesting than that. Then got a job and out of a sudden started making my own money by writing Delphi code. Up until then I wasn’t really aware that my passion would also bring food on the table. The rest is history.
Programming in those days felt unreal. Felt like The Matrix. I knew that what I want to do for the rest of my life is look at text on a screen, hit CTRL+F9, see a crash, set some breakpoints, and ponder around the room or while taking a piss about what went wrong and how to solve it. I’m no Einstein, but I understood why science people dedicate their lifes to their work and disregard completely their social life.
I always read a lot. 100+ books a year, plus magazines. Then I got a job in the boonies and got home only on weekends. All of a sudden I was reading a book a day. Even with the library and used book stores, that was financially ruinous for our young family. So I bought a VIC-20, a used b&w tv, and the programmer’s reference manual to take out to the work camps… The savings on books paid for the system in just a few months.
One thing led to another and a decade or so later I made the transition from hobby to career. Now I’m retired and looking to reboot as a hobbyist.
Was majoring in accounting and had to take a CS101 class programming in Pascal. Changed majors immediately, thinking “Where has this been all my life?” This predates PCs, although I did have a Commodore 64 to practice coding on BASIC after that.
I always thought engineering is cool but time consuming. Programming was picked up along the way and now the money is too good to do anything else. Wish I could work on devices again.
Making games, which, I’ve come to discover, is basically the Santa Claus of programming because most professional developers that I know started for the same reason and absolute do not program or develop games.
Same here. Always wanted to do cool games. But wanted to have an even cooler scripting language for the game. At some point programming languages became more interesting. Now working in ide development :D never finished a game
MISSINGNO.
December 8th, 2009 - Motorola Droid successfully rooted … [granting] root access on the phone using a terminal emulator. This is how I learned bash which inevitably pushed me into pursuing proper Computer Science.
After typing in a bunch of programs on my 1KB Sinclair ZX-81 I wanted to understand how they worked and wanted to make some of my own.
Pretty much from the same era. Either you learned how to teach your computer to do stuff or you were stuck with an expensive paperweight.
It was a natural progression for me, over the years I’ve gotten my fingers into a lot of pies across tech from running servers to REing to PCB design/Making and programming serves as a bit of glue to interconnect it all and then I fell in love with it.
But ONLY as a hobby, I know me and if I had to do it as a career day in and day out I’m not going to want to do it recreationally and the love and passion will eventually burn out. Although I do find areas to sprinkle it in in my career to make my job easier.
Back in the mid to late nineties I used America Online and the warez chat rooms. I found out Visual Basic was used to create bot programs and now I work for a big tech company.
I don’t really remember. I guess I saw some cool stuff done with programming and wanted to make those things toom So I learnt Python.
I used to make bots in RuneScape. If I’m being honest post high school I had to pick something and just said fuck it CS degree
