As a career, I started with an internship with a small (~6 employees) consulting company in my hometown of ~10k people, which turned into employment and so on.
As to learning, it started when I weas ~12 and diagnosed with a learning disability related to my handwriting, which was slow (I drew my letter forms rather than writing them, it turns out these are different parts of the brain) and resulting in my performing well below my tested aptitude. My parents put me through a brief summer school typing class, and borrowed an Apple ][ from the local school system. With a Apple programming book borrowed from the local librarian (not libaray), my father walked me through the book and I quickly took to programming. Later we got a PC and I switched to GW Basic, then went to National Computer Camp over the summer and learned C (which I proceeded to not use, but I used the learning from that to learn Pascal on my own, with Turbo Pascal 5), and then x86 Assembler the following year. At this point I was entering High School and enrolled in the algorithms class as the local college, and really, at this point I was deep in programming as a hobby. I wrote software on paper in my notebooks in classes that bored me. I also did a lot of a friend's college C homework for them and as a result finally properly learned C. Eventually I dropped out of high school (it was a bad time, a very bad time) and got a GED and then landed the aforesaid internship...
At that internship, I had to learn a language called Clipper (a dBase III derivative) from reference manuals before moving to a full position. None of that carried on to my career however. The skill set that actually led to my real career came after, learning HTML, JS and Perl on my own time from experimentation and extremely crappy reference material. (I didn't know about the Llama book, nor did I realize that Perl's man pages were as extensive as they were.)
So ... a university CS class was involved? Also some other direct instruction? Does that count as self taught still? Mostly my learning was self directed, but also not exclusively.
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As a career, I started with an internship with a small (~6 employees) consulting company in my hometown of ~10k people, which turned into employment and so on.
As to learning, it started when I weas ~12 and diagnosed with a learning disability related to my handwriting, which was slow (I drew my letter forms rather than writing them, it turns out these are different parts of the brain) and resulting in my performing well below my tested aptitude. My parents put me through a brief summer school typing class, and borrowed an Apple ][ from the local school system. With a Apple programming book borrowed from the local librarian (not libaray), my father walked me through the book and I quickly took to programming. Later we got a PC and I switched to GW Basic, then went to National Computer Camp over the summer and learned C (which I proceeded to not use, but I used the learning from that to learn Pascal on my own, with Turbo Pascal 5), and then x86 Assembler the following year. At this point I was entering High School and enrolled in the algorithms class as the local college, and really, at this point I was deep in programming as a hobby. I wrote software on paper in my notebooks in classes that bored me. I also did a lot of a friend's college C homework for them and as a result finally properly learned C. Eventually I dropped out of high school (it was a bad time, a very bad time) and got a GED and then landed the aforesaid internship...
At that internship, I had to learn a language called Clipper (a dBase III derivative) from reference manuals before moving to a full position. None of that carried on to my career however. The skill set that actually led to my real career came after, learning HTML, JS and Perl on my own time from experimentation and extremely crappy reference material. (I didn't know about the Llama book, nor did I realize that Perl's man pages were as extensive as they were.)
So ... a university CS class was involved? Also some other direct instruction? Does that count as self taught still? Mostly my learning was self directed, but also not exclusively.