How did you learn how to code?
Was it because you went to university, a bootcamp, youtube or what?
I learned Visual Basic 6 via youtube when I was 15. Then I started to get into HTML and CSS. One day it was time for me to go to college and I started my Bio-Nanotechnology degree.At that time when I was in school for that degreee were using C++ to code genes. Sadly, the major was heavily focus on Chemistry and not much programming.
One day when I was talking to my parents my mom said "I don't know why are you in that major, if you love computers. You should change to something more focused on that". My momma was damn right! I changed my major to Computer Science got a scholarship to study in the USA, 10 years later here I am still doing what I love, code!
Thanks momma for helping my change paths in my career and being so supportive. Love you mom!
Now when I try to learn a new technology I usually jump in to a course on Udemy. When I try to learn something more specific to an specific technolgoy, I do dev.to, or any article I see on the internet.
Top comments (15)
So my journey started back in 2014. I first learned on KhanAcademy, which I soon fell out of favour with as I didn’t really feel I was growing my skill set as I felt the courses there aren’t for me.
Then, I discovered Codecademy. I first learned JS, then HTML & CSS. Believe it or not, my fear of feeling like a cheater prevented me from browsing StackOverflow, which sort of hampered my progress. I learned on Codecademy on-and-off for a few years until 2017, where I started to build a few static websites with bits of JavaScript.
Fast forward to 2019, I’m working for a digital agency, have contributed to a couple of projects, have a clearer idea of my path and I’m a much better developer than I was in the beginning, and I browse StackOverflow almost every single day! 😂
I got into minecraft modding in 2012 and then it just kinda spiraled from there.
I was a kid from a poor immigrant family that happened to land in a lucky suburb of the United States where they had just built a new primary school that was funded by a learning software company. This was back in the late '80s.
The company provided the school with lots of computers and software in exchange for getting to test their software out on the kids. So a lot of our learning revolved around using computers. Add to that, we had regular computer classes and a programming club.
Starting around age 10, I started learning BASIC programming, and I fell in love with it. I can still remember the first little programs I wrote. I would go to the local library and check out books about BASIC and replicate all the programs and exercises in them. There wasn't a lot of software around back then, so anything extra that you could create by yourself was like magic.
Junior high didn't offer anything in the way of programming education, but in high school, I took PASCAL and COBOL classes, then Java classes later. Decades later, currently I'm mostly in the web dev world, so JS.
Does coding WordPerfect macros at age 8 count?
As a kid, I was obsessed with the automation of word processors.
My mom would enroll me in part-time college computer classes.
I am still quite disappointed people don't know to use tab stops.
I took weekly classes on a "lab" of sorts that was hosted on my local "house of arts and literature" (this is the closest I can translate it from Greek)
I was like 10 or something, and the internet was relatively new (~1997). Learned QBASIC first and then Pascal. Good times
In 2014, while serving in the army, a warrant officer saw that I had no direction in my life, so he decided to help me. He set up a content roadmap to learn. A stack with PHP, Jquery, PostgreSQL.
Then I helped maintain military applications and created an authentication portal for existing applications.
I had just come out of an 8 month period where I was very sick, bedridden and generally unhappy. I had quit my job just before that period started and it wasn't in the career I wanted. I had no idea what I was going to do with my future, so one day I woke up, sat at my computer and started to teach myself to code.
I used CS50, random courses, books and a lot of tinkering. I did it all alone which was quite isolating and I would definitely do it with others if I could redo it. I'd have learned a lot more.
With a lot of hard work, and a lot of luck as I knew some folk in the industry already: I was interning at a large company with 3ish months. I've been a professional programmer for over four years now, waiting to hear back about a promotion to Senior. Next stop, tech lead!
Started off working with MS SQL as part of a general customer support role. Realised I enjoyed the SQL side more than the first line support so moved to the data intelligence team.
Got my feet wet with SSIS and picked up C# from there.
Angular seemed a natural fit to complete the stack, and now I work with .NET core as an API provider with angular as a front end.
I made really ugly websites in the early 2000s with Flash and then didn't touch it for nearly 15 years. Went back to school for a degree in web design in 2014 and fell in love with code. First love was PhP, now im on the JS Hype train!
I started my IT career in a web-design / internet service provider back in 2000, as a dial-up support technician... It was a scapegoat job. When everything was working, there was nothing to do and when things went belly-up, my job was to get screamed at by the customers and tell them we were looking into it...
One day where I was extra bored, I picked up the Mastering Visual Basic 6 book that was gathering dust in the office bookshelf and started reading it.
I was on page 6 or so when my boss passed by my desk.
"What are you doing?", she asked.
"I'm bored so I'm learning something." I replied
She dropped a spec on my desk and said "There! You've got 2 weeks."
It was a very basic "contact us" page for an existing client. Something that would have taken the actual devs a few hours to do. I did it in 5 days. That may not sound that cool, but remember that in 2000, there was no stackoverflow :)
After that, I handed it in to the QA guys and started reading my big book again.
She walked by my desk again and the conversation started the same way as the previous time.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm bored so I'm learning something."
"What did you do with the stuff I gave you last week?"
"Handed it to Fred..."
She turned to Fred (That's the QA guy) and he gave her the thumbs up. So she turned back to me, dropped a bigger spec on my desk and said "You've got 2 months for this"
A month later, I was promoted junior dev and she hired someone to take over the scapegoat part of my job.
After that I just kept learning...