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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Started out when I was in grade 4. I was still a script kiddie back then, copying batch scripts all over Internet. Then I was exposed to QB64 and learnt some BASIC (20% learning, 80% copying examples). Then i stopped for a while. When I visited coding later on at grade 7 i used FreeBASIC which is an awesome piece of software that I ever used. A few months later a friend found me to work together on a project. That's when i started learning coding for real again
Started on Visual Basic for Applications when I was 6! Basically I was just playing around on PowerPoint one day (to me back then I thought that PowerPoint was the best program ever as it's got soo many features) when I managed to get into the macro system. I then went from there, downloaded Visual Studio a few years later for VB.Net.
Whilst of course VB isn't really a language I use any more (I'm a JavaScript guy that also does a lot of Python), I still find it fun to play around with creating weird and wonderful PowerPoints when I want to get a bit of nostalgia!
Though I have switched to Chrome OS lately after purchasing a Pixelbook, I still fire up my old XP PC from back in the day to have a little play around on (and to see what stupid and somewhat strange files I made back then!).
At age of 12(now I am 24), I wanted to hack Skype credits. This lead me to learn about programming language. I first learned C then C++ and other webish oriented language from "site-du-zero"(now named openclassroom) .
Now I have a BS in computer science and I am pursuing my master in software engineering.
I wanted to go into the medical field. That had been my dream for my entire life — becoming a pediatric trauma surgeon.
Age 16, I fell down a staircase, hit my head on the banister, and suffered a grade three traumatic brain injury. I went from a being a straight 4.0 high school sophomore at college-level reading to failing pre-K material. I couldn't read. I couldn't make sense of the world. I looked okay, but my old mind was gone.
Prior to the head injury, I had been good at math, but I hated it with every fiber of my being. I didn't really understand it that well, I just knew how to do it. About a year after the head injury, I found that while I had lost my talent for the natural sciences, I had gained the ability to understand math and logic at a deeper level.
About two years after the head injury, I'd regained a lot of ground and was mostly back to high school material. I'd decided I wanted to make educational software for my senior project (I'd been given an extra two years to finish high school because of the brain injury.) This led to my learning programming, and falling in love with it.
I've been coding for nearly a decade now, having self-trained myself in multiple languages. The challenges I had to overcome to get here have uniquely enabled me to teach and mentor others. I wouldn't trade this career field for anything.
At the age of 16 I went to a sixth form college that had a computing course. Naturally, I was interested in computers from a really early age so I took it up.
On the induction day, we were taught to make a slot machine program in Visual Basic 6.0. It wasn't advanced at all - you click the button and it would randomly generate 3 images using VB's Random and there were rules to implement like if the 3 images matched and they were all oranges, give X amounts of credits etc.
I absolutely loved that and when I went home I basically pirated a copy of VB6 and just tried to code anything that I could possibly think of. At the time it was just simple buttons that would open up Control Panel to defeat the college's computer security and whatnot, but that's where I really bit my teeth into programming.
I then went to university to do Computer Science and it made me realise that the field is pretty diverse, but I'd also say that in the real world only my first year lectures applied to the real world.
Some stuff was irrellevant (Graphics course), some of the courses were poorly explained (Networking course), and some courses were obsolete by the time I entered the real world (Databases course banging on about MySQL - when I started my job we were using Postgres).
Some courses were so painfully outdated that it was actually wrong (thanks Concurrency course - luckily Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz set me straight).
While I'm glad I went to university to help me get my foot in the door, I really don't think it's necessary at all or even advisable, especially if you are in the UK as the tuition fees are basically extortion. I'd advise newcomers to look into apprentice roles where they can learn on the job and get paid instead.
Actually my brother is a software engineer in Germany . He said I can do programming and I start with his friend . So I have trained with him .
I am Coding for two months now !
I am in 12 grade so basically dont have any proper degree yet (though I am thinking of pursuing one )
Yes I am a self taught (still teaching myself😄) coder. I stay in a rural area and my insyllabus studies dont spare me to join conferences and other community programs though I will surely be attending a lot of those after I pass my class 12 . I learn to code because I love to create !
Early learning then self taught....
Fortran in 1978
BBC Basic in 1981
6502 assembler in 1981
Z80 assembler in 1983
Pascal in 1985
Owl in 1985
C in 1985
68000 in 1985
Cobol 1988
C++ sometime later
Visual Basic 1,2,3,4,5,6,.Net
C#
F#
Java, Jscript, ....
plus loads other in the journey!
COBOL in '88 really stands out, considering how many things you're a VERY early adopter of. 6502 in 1981? Wow!
I was a Geology major and graduated with a BS degree in '95, so primarily self-taught from the git-go. First "real" job out of college was working for an Environmental Consulting company doing emissions testing at power plants, which led me into technical report writing, which led me to finding all kind of inefficiencies with the process. I was all about making things more efficient.
An aside, there was one guy doing all IT-related things there and we were on Windows 3.1 and had just converted to Windows 95. Lotus Notes was leveraged. We even had a single computer in the Library (yes, there was dedicated room with a bunch of industry-related books in it) that connected to the internet using a company AOL account. We connected through dial-up. Think about all those old-school modem ring tones you used to love. I digress, but oh, the memories...
During that time, Excel worksheets would be used to log test results, which were created "new" every time. Just think of all the time wasted...These results would be given to support staff (me) and I would create reports from the data, then pass that off to data entry staff to pretty everything up.
I learned about Excel VBA Macros from a co-worker who was also tinkering on his own at the time, and knew a heck of a lot more than me. I was fortunate enough to have him there able and willing to guide me along. He taught me a lot. I discovered that if I just record macros, that the code could repeat everything I just did manually. Woah, this is powerful stuff, Awesome! I then learned that I could manipulate this code to make it do different things. I studied the code the macros output and this is how I learned how to code. I did this for about a year and consumed about 50% of my job. At that point, I realized that this is really what I wanted to do, so I looked for full-time opportunities of being a programmer, which was in 1998, put my resume on Monster.com and was hired 1-week later by a consulting company. As they say, the rest is history...
Self-taught from QBasic on an old 286 back in 1993, and later from a Dummies Guide to C++, then Java, then once I had an early 90 MHz Pentium moved on to HTML/Javascript in 96/97. All while living in rural area, no internet until 97 and even then it was on an old copper wire line that couldn't do better than 1.4 kbps. Kinda I guess like the old "when I went to school... walked backwards and uphill both ways...", etc ;)
Edit: Just remembered that technically I first learned a programming language in 1986, grade 1 we were introduced to the LOGO language. Didn't have a computer at home though so while I actually do still remember it, I wouldn't have had a ton of practice: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(progra...