I started programming HyperCard when I was 8, and started to learn "real" languages like Scheme and C when I was 13, but I stopped for a while after high school. I went to a really intense STEM program in high school. The dudes in that program were, well, what you might expect. Some of them were great, but there were also a lot of sexist jerks. The program made some attempts to undercut this. My 9th grade CS class involved a tour of different programming paradigms -- Excel, Scheme, boolean algebra for chip design, even visual programming with STELLA -- and was deliberately designed to disorient the hotshot jerks and get them to realize that they didn't know everything. But it mostly didn't work. Also, some of the teachers had #metoo problems -- bad for the girls directly, and a bad influence on the guys.
Even so I spent a lot of that time fooling around with HTML and CSS -- but I didn't think of that as "real programming," just like I hadn't thought of HyperCard as "real programming." "Real programming" was C++, right? And I wasn't all that good at C++.
(God, I'm glad I'm over that attitude!)
After high school, I stopped programming for a while. I went to my local community college's theater program, learned how to paint scenery, and started to have a budding career as a set designer & scenic painter.
This budding career did not involve health insurance. It did involve back problems.
So I got a tech support & web production job. Because I wasn't really a programmer, right? The only things I was good at were HTML and CSS. That wasn't enough to go for PROGRAMMING jobs. And learning Rails on the side to help code fanfiction sites, that wasn't really programming either, and anyway I wasn't that good at it yet.
Luckily, someone saw "Rails" on my resume when I applied for an online community management job and put it in the "programmer" resume pile instead. It completely changed my life. That was a decade ago. Now, the only reason I worry about health insurance is that I started my own business a year ago. Last year I got a free trip to Singapore to speak at a conference. I won't say it got rid of the back problems, but they're a lot better now -- and they mostly only crop up when I code too much from my couch instead of my office.
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Lot of feelings about this one!
I started programming HyperCard when I was 8, and started to learn "real" languages like Scheme and C when I was 13, but I stopped for a while after high school. I went to a really intense STEM program in high school. The dudes in that program were, well, what you might expect. Some of them were great, but there were also a lot of sexist jerks. The program made some attempts to undercut this. My 9th grade CS class involved a tour of different programming paradigms -- Excel, Scheme, boolean algebra for chip design, even visual programming with STELLA -- and was deliberately designed to disorient the hotshot jerks and get them to realize that they didn't know everything. But it mostly didn't work. Also, some of the teachers had #metoo problems -- bad for the girls directly, and a bad influence on the guys.
Even so I spent a lot of that time fooling around with HTML and CSS -- but I didn't think of that as "real programming," just like I hadn't thought of HyperCard as "real programming." "Real programming" was C++, right? And I wasn't all that good at C++.
(God, I'm glad I'm over that attitude!)
After high school, I stopped programming for a while. I went to my local community college's theater program, learned how to paint scenery, and started to have a budding career as a set designer & scenic painter.
This budding career did not involve health insurance. It did involve back problems.
So I got a tech support & web production job. Because I wasn't really a programmer, right? The only things I was good at were HTML and CSS. That wasn't enough to go for PROGRAMMING jobs. And learning Rails on the side to help code fanfiction sites, that wasn't really programming either, and anyway I wasn't that good at it yet.
Luckily, someone saw "Rails" on my resume when I applied for an online community management job and put it in the "programmer" resume pile instead. It completely changed my life. That was a decade ago. Now, the only reason I worry about health insurance is that I started my own business a year ago. Last year I got a free trip to Singapore to speak at a conference. I won't say it got rid of the back problems, but they're a lot better now -- and they mostly only crop up when I code too much from my couch instead of my office.