How did you get your start in programming? Are you self-taught? Went through a coding bootcamp? Graduated from university with a CS degree?
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I don't have a CS "degree", but having taken some CS before dropping the major I certainly learned enough about code before quitting and rediscovering the craft later.
I was just thinking about how much my self-taught time was really just online teachers I didn't know personally.
Kevin Skoglund's Lynda.com courses and Ryan Bates' Railscasts were basically my teacher.
My true origin story is Geocities in 7th grade. There were a couple other kids with their own websites at the time and a friend of mine started a site for his band. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
I didn't consistently have access to a home computer growing up or else I might have stuck with this stuff instead of falling in and out until I was an adult.
Wow Geocities, that's a blast from the past!
I built my first sites on AngelFire and Geocities back in 1997, and on a whim decided to see if they're still around. Geocities is not, but Lycos is still operating AngelFire, and you can still build a free site there! #omg
twitter.com/davidcanhelp/status/11...
Around the start of 2017 I started to grow quite weary with my job in commercial and social research. It just so happens at this time a mate from school was looking to improve his mentoring and coaching skills for programming. He was trying to find someone to serve as his humble guinea pig, and given my circumstances, I was happy to oblige. Pair programming and TDD via Codewars katas was therefore my entrypoint into the world.
I think what first struck me was how fun and accessible it all was. Beyond general IT classes, there wasn't a great emphasis on programming in the UK curriculum when I was at school; as a result I'd often considered it an esoteric career that only an exclusive few could do. So enjoyment in mind, I decided to carry on with the mentoring - largely consisting of weekly pair programming sessions after work over a few beers. Shortly after, I handed in my notice and, with some trepidation in April 2017, quit my job in research to focus on learning to code full-time.
At that point I had developed an interest in web development and was primarily working on mini projects, FreeCodeCamp and YouTube tutorials in tandem with the mentoring. I also went to meetups in and around London. There's a great community in the city, and I found it immensely helpful being able to bounce thoughts off people and listen to devs share their experiences.
I got into a rhythm of these activities and in late 2017, after sending a few applications out, I was offered a position as a junior frontend developer for a startup based in the city. That's where I'm currently based; it's all good fun, and with a great community of devs nearby, I feel comfortable working in programming. Definitely feel vindicated having taken the leap!
its insane how widespread this ridiculous misconception is globally.
Its quite unbelievable.
Fate, honestly. I applied in University for two things, Teaching and Computer Science (honestly because those two words sounded cool together). Got accepted for both but there were complications with teaching enrollments during registration so I took CS.
Before then, I knew only FL Studio and Virtual DJ. This was 2014.
First semester felt ridiculous. After most classes I'd say to myself "I know we're just being introduced to programming but Microsoft Word doesn't look like it was made by an array sorting algorithm"
Right when my grades were at their worst, I looked at reapplying for mechanical engineering somewhere else, then there was an event organized by a students' society where a lecturer gave a talk on Android programming and Software Engineering. My life changed right there and then. I wanted to learn everything! Of course at first that didn't help me academically as I was overwhelmed by information available on the web. At the start of the following year, I reregistered Computer Science with a different second major (calculus showed me flames, I had to ditch it) and by the middle of the year I had taught myself enough to host my own Android and Web dev tutorial classes for my peers. Varsity came with theoretical knowledge that was easy to consume as I would have probably implemented it somewhere following an online tutorial i.e. while studying design patterns the MVP made sense then, after I've been struggling with its existence and use in AngularJS.
I'm currently finishing up on my second major to complete my degree.
Sounds a lot like how I had felt at the time, but I didn't really discover my place until after I'd dropped CS. My school offered very little in practical software development. Only CS and Math.
I had already changed majors out of computer science. I had gotten into tech entrepreneurship but thought it was going to be someone else's job to actually make the stuff. I'd do the marketing. Along the way I stumbled across Ruby on Rails and finally found a platform that empowered my creativity.
I also almost dropped out for the very same reasons but I only held on because my first attempt in freelancing and a startup failed, (great learning experience). Went back to the drawing board, and class. I've learned so much more from then, I'm just waiting for my eureka moment now.
I'm "self-taught," meaning that I learned from the community of developers around me and on the internet. I learned largely from sites like The Odin Project and FreeCodeCamp.
My first software engineering job came through a recruiter who contacted me because I networked my way into a handful of internships that gave me real-world experience.
I was around 11 or 12 years old when I got into doing dolling pixel art, bunch of girls teaching other girls how to do websites to showcase our dolls hahahaha it was my first experience with web development even though it was very basic html and css. Funky chicken was my main resource site ~
Later on I wanted to study graphic design but in the end decided to study computer engineering, my first real programming experience was with pascal. Had lots of fun during my studies. Had my I gotcha moment in structures & algorithms 2. I don't know how I managed to pass my subjects before, but that's when I finally understood how to program.
I still want to study graphic design (or take an art course) in the future since it's a bit difficult for me right now, so I just look, get inspired and drool with everything designers and illustrators showcase in sites like dribbble, instagram and uplabs. :3
OMG FUNKY CHICKENS!!
Man, what a blast from the past 😂 I was a big fan of that site as well! Thanks for sharing your story.
what if I told you...
funkychickens.com/main.asp
it's still alive!!
I was huge fan too, it was my favorite resource site when I was a kid :D
I started programming as a sophomore in high school, trying to code a text-based RPG on my TI-83+. It was a horrible morass of ifs and gotos, since I didn't know how loops worked =P
I then took some C++ and Java classes my junior and senior year, and majored in CS in college. I did a lot of hacking on open source stuff during college too, which really helped fill in some of the gaps the more academically-oriented cirriculum had in it.
A text based RPG on a calculator, that sounds fantastic!
Youre hired.
I am a cs major, but a self taught programmer. I learnt all the theoretical concepts without enough practical work in school. All I can saying is that teaching myself to code via a small community of friends and materials through the internet has helped me understand and get a better grasp of what I was being taught in college
At first I blamed school for this. I later realized that if they actually taught us more tech stacks and frameworks, a degree would be outdated even before graduation.
I grew up around popular science and sci-fi magazines and always loved reading about tech from a very early age. When I was 7 I came home from "vacation" to find my father had purchased a Tandy from Radio Shack. This was shocking to me, we didn't have any money for this. I spent hours and hours on it learning how to do things. Eventually, I pirated a very early version of Visual Basic and used the IDE to learn what things did what. This lead to creating some applications, websites, and even helping family members who were already in engineering positions within a few years. I never looked back and have known what I wanted to do since the day I wrote my first VB application.
Tandy was fun! My friend and I were able to get free Tandy parts that people were throwing away (this was in the days of windows 95, so Tandy was obsolete pretty much), and we loved messing with them :)
I wrote my first program on a Commodore 64 sitting on display in the center of a mall at Christmas time. My mother had left me to wait for her while she went shopping and when she got back there was a small crowd around me and a multicoloured "My name is..." rolling up the screen infinitely. It was the 80s equivalent of "Hello World". A year later they bought me my own Commodore 64 and I began typing games in "BASIC" from a book I bought called something like "38 Games You Can Program Yourself".
When I graduated high school I taught myself dBase IV/Clipper and later learned C/C++ which got me my first gig in telecommunications. That's all there was in Canada in those days. Eventually, I found my way back to my first love - games.
My C-64 programming progress was :
Then to make it fill the whole screen using a trailing ';' :
Then realised putting the GOTO on the same line made it run much faster :
It's all been downhill since then.... ;-)
Cool, I had the exact same experience.
That single semi-colon (on a TRS-80) changed my life... 40 years ago.
CS degree, developing Internet applications since Gopher days.
Occasionally get the same ';' feeling with new JavaScript features.
Now take what Uglify creates for me as a starting point,
and make JS code faster and tinier
My first exposure to programming was during my junior year in high school. They were offering a "Computer Science" class and that sounded kind of interesting to me. We learned how to program on Macintosh computers using Apple Basic.
When it came time to pick a major in college about a year later, I couldn't think of anything except Computer Science. So I jumped in the CS water and almost immediately started to drown! And this was just "Computer Science I" learning Pascal.
I'd say by the end of that first semester I finally had my light-bulb moment (regarding specifically what, I can't remember). From that near-desperate moment on, I have been involved in programming for a living (after I got out of college, of course).
I got stuck in the dying world of X-Base programming right away (FoxPro) even though I was supposed to be a COBOL programmer. I'm kind of glad they had me learn FoxPro, but I definitely overstayed my welcome in that language. I've been pretty much a .NET developer for the last 10 years, fortunately!