Had a friend who's dad was a programmer (early 90's). Always fascinated me. We played a lot with video games (and also punch cards!) at his place. Was around age 6 - 10. But did not get into programming.
Then, changed the text in the translation file of Sid Meier's Civilization II. I understood that. 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". I really just wanted to cheat in games though :-)
Then took a while of self-learning to find out about VB Script first, then later got the book "C++ in 21 days". Around 14 years old then I think. And put up a terrible website.
Then moved on to PHP + MySql to make a little blog (full of security holes, as evidenced by the spam in the comments). And played around with Linux.
Meanwhile, in high school I was failing most classes. Because I was somehow going for aircraft mechanic (fail). Then went to business / economics (fail) and then graphical design (barely passed). None of which I cared about much. But I had to get through to go to college. Though I did program stuff on the calculators we got. To calculate invoices and also a casino game similar to drug wars. But that was somehow not appreciated ...
Took until college (2004) to actually do what I love in school: Electronics-ICT. There got into .NET. The only 3 years I actually enjoyed school.
Then got a job doing technical consultancy / developing custom projects.
Still learning every day and will be doing that forever.
So, really, self-taught for the most part (books + internet). Spent more time programming than doing school work. Ended up fine, but caused my parents a lot of stress at the time. I blame the school system, forcing me to choose things I did not care for much.
Some things might be chronologically incorrect.
Lots of respect for people who only got into it later on, "from left field".
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Had a friend who's dad was a programmer (early 90's). Always fascinated me. We played a lot with video games (and also punch cards!) at his place. Was around age 6 - 10. But did not get into programming.
Then, changed the text in the translation file of Sid Meier's Civilization II. I understood that. 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". I really just wanted to cheat in games though :-)
Then took a while of self-learning to find out about VB Script first, then later got the book "C++ in 21 days". Around 14 years old then I think. And put up a terrible website.
Then moved on to PHP + MySql to make a little blog (full of security holes, as evidenced by the spam in the comments). And played around with Linux.
Meanwhile, in high school I was failing most classes. Because I was somehow going for aircraft mechanic (fail). Then went to business / economics (fail) and then graphical design (barely passed). None of which I cared about much. But I had to get through to go to college. Though I did program stuff on the calculators we got. To calculate invoices and also a casino game similar to drug wars. But that was somehow not appreciated ...
Took until college (2004) to actually do what I love in school: Electronics-ICT. There got into .NET. The only 3 years I actually enjoyed school.
Then got a job doing technical consultancy / developing custom projects.
Still learning every day and will be doing that forever.
So, really, self-taught for the most part (books + internet). Spent more time programming than doing school work. Ended up fine, but caused my parents a lot of stress at the time. I blame the school system, forcing me to choose things I did not care for much.
Some things might be chronologically incorrect.
Lots of respect for people who only got into it later on, "from left field".