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Ndeye Fatou Diop -
Teo Nordic -
Scofield Idehen -
Hanzla Baig -
Top comments (44)
I joined my father to the university he worked at when I was 4. It was an open day, and they had lots of computers. When I was 8 years old I (finally!) got my first computer, an Oric1 with 48K of RAM - This was in 1982. I never really strayed away since then ... ;)
I'll See your Oric1 and I'll raise you an Apple IIe (in the Apple shop) or a TRS-80 which was my first home computer (2nd hand and cost my Dad £200 in 1979: Equivalent to £1200 today with 1K ram and 200 baud tape deck.)
I think I decided that I really wanted to code in 1988 after I wrote a program in DBII to manage the results of our local running club annual race. I was 18 and had been studying It at Junior college for 6 months and built a commercial grade application. Well chuffed.
Nice! I didn't intend for it to be a competition though. My father died when I was 5, and I didn't know him that well, so I made him into this fictional figure in my head, where I could never be as good as him, driving me way beyond what's "healthy" one might argue. Even though it ended up having a "happy ending", it's really a sad story ...
These days were amazing though for kids like us; The end of the 70s and the early 80s that is. Most computers came with instructional manuals we could read to learn coding, and it was very easy for us to express ourselves creatively in code. I feel sorry for the kids of today when I think about how much more difficult it has become to experience the same as we did ...
When I was part of the startup industry in Asia and found out that the traditional way of thinking in marketing and growth does not provide the needed results. It led me to growth hacking strategies where automation and handy Python scripts were shortcuts to successful customer acquisition.
I was playing with excel macros and managed to save hours consolidating a load of data.
At that point that rush of “wow I could save so much time and solve many problems” kicked in and I had to learn software development…the tools and language I use might have changed, but that rush of solving a problem and saving time or creating something beautiful has never gone away.
If you count when I didn't know what a software developer was, then in elementary. But realistically, in my second year of college.
Tl;DR SciFi Cartoons
I started to be interested on computers since I watched Dexter's Lab on Cartoon Network, on my Elementary School I learned the basics about using a computer, but I think I was fascinated with a French cartoon called Code Lyoko where one of the protagonists discover a super computer on a abandoned factory near his school
I have expose to programming since my bachelors degree. But the moment I got into motorcycle accident during labour work 6 month after graduating makes me realise, I not fit to do labour work and I love to do C and Assembly programming during my study.
So, during my recovering time, 3 days, I do some self reflection and decide to start my software development journey with web development.
And now, 2 years later, I become a frontend developer for almost 2 years already.
I became interested in programming thanks to graphing calculators, but I think what signaled to me that this was something I could actually do was when I was appointed as a so-called "superguru" on Wikidot, a now practically-dead web platform.
The recognition was a big inspiration to the high-school version of me.
I learned to code because I was cheating on trivia games that rewarded money like HQ trivia by reverse-engineering their APIs and creating bots to help me win.
Once I got bored of that, I moved onto tech support scammer vigilantism.
After that, I started building personal fullstack projects.
Moved onto teaching kids to code.
THEN one day, on a whim, I decided to start applying for work.
I was always just a hobby for me, right up until the day I got my first job offers, and I'm so glad it ended up that way.
I love what I do. 🥰
I loved maths and I loved IT. I combined them and began a computer science degree with little programming knowledge. I knew this was what I wanted to do when I was able to build my first simple HTML site. I was learning HTML from codecademy and was using windows Notepad app (I've learned since the beauty of VS code). It was amazing how I could create a website just using notepad and adding an extention of .HTML. Mindblown.
Then I discovered react and depoyment and Typescript.... Now I'm a full stack software engineer. It's amazing looking back at those notepad days now deploying code for 10,000 users..
my first website was written in PERL 3 and used CGI (Common Gateway Interface). 1998 I think.
Spring Quarter (do any universities still use the Quarter system?) of 1981. On the third day of “Intro to FORTRAN” I went and changed my major to Computer Science and never looked back. It was absolutely the right choice.