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Discussion on: Were you born to be a developer?

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Dian Fay

I learned BASIC at age 8 with help from my father, copying code listings out of the back of his Sky and Telescope magazines and so forth. I discovered recursion by trying to port fractal generators from C books, wrote the kind of primitive games you'd expect a kid to write, tried and repeatedly failed to wrap my head around OpenGL (I think I got as far as rendering and moving the classic teapot). Minus the BASIC and anything having to do with graphics programming, I've kept it up ever since, dropping out of a CS degree program to work fulltime as a developer and now an architect.

I'm good at what I do, and that extra decade of reading, writing, and understanding code and computers has certainly helped. But I don't really think of it as being "ahead" of my colleagues. Even early on in my career, I might have been more acclimated to simply doing work on a computer and even more used to syntax conventions, but that didn't mean I understood source control or knew SQL. It's more like I had relevant but not always directly applicable experience. And of course, once you reach a certain point it no longer matters so much just how long you've been at it.