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Kelly Vaughn
Kelly Vaughn

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What's your coding origin story?

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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ben profile image
Ben Halpern • Edited

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.

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Helen Anderson

Wow Geocities, that's a blast from the past!

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David Christian Liedle

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...

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Ravi 🐧

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!

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Vincent Buscarello

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

its insane how widespread this ridiculous misconception is globally.

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Jacob Herrington (he/him)

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.

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Sdu

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.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

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.

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.

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Sdu

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.

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Pandita • Edited

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

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Anna Rankin

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.

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panditapan profile image
Pandita

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

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Rob Hoelz

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.

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Steven Conner

A text based RPG on a calculator, that sounds fantastic!

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keynesyoudigit profile image
Vincent Buscarello

Trying to code a text-based RPG on my TI-83+

Youre hired.

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Adebayo-Ige Toyosi

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

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Sdu

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.

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Will Blew 👨🏼‍💻

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.

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Steven Conner

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 :)

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Darryl Wright

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.

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ohffs

My C-64 programming progress was :

10 PRINT "Hello"
20 GOTO 10

Then to make it fill the whole screen using a trailing ';' :

10 PRINT "Hello ";
20 GOTO 10

Then realised putting the GOTO on the same line made it run much faster :

10 PRINT "Hello "; GOTO 10

It's all been downhill since then.... ;-)

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Danny Engelman • Edited

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

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Jesse Gabriel

First week of community college at a Computer Information Systems class. No actual coding is involved actually since the class is to learn Microsoft Office (I was bamboozled)... But professor actually taught another CS class and announced an event called Global Game Jam (A 48-hour coding sesh just like Hackathon, but focuses on creating games).

I decided to go even without any prior coding experience besides writing "Hello World" from YouTube the night before. I was put on a team and since I had a background with music and can't really code, I was in charge of making SFX and music.

Long story short, despite not coding at all in the event, I fell in love with the process of working with a team to create something completely messy, buggy, yet wonderful.

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Jean Kaplansky

Hah! I found the one OTHER "how'd you get started" post that mentions music... Here's the second:

I went to college to earn my Bachelor's in Viola Performance. Yes. You read that correctly.

However, the music school at my university shared the same campus as the Engineering school. Technical skills started dribbling in by osmosis.

I wasn't really coding until a few years later though. I spent the years after college working for a typographic media services company where I learned the craft of typography and book and journal layout. This experience led me down the street to a startup (this was the mid-90's BTW) who were looking for people who could write automated typographic "stylesheets" for their very industrial SGML-based authoring/publishing solutions. It made more sense to teach a typographer programming than to go the other way around. CSS anyone? Yeah. Stylesheet languages have never been functional, although the results of what stylesheets do have often been based on the ability to test conditionals or a function return value.

Then the XML years happened. I got my database feet under me during this time. I wrote more stylesheets and XML Schemas and configured lots of XML-based software solutions while dabbling in ebooks and WordPress just because.

Ebook and ebook production workflow architecture became a full-time job in 2012. I spent some time working with various standards committees and publishing accessibility groups like the IDPF, DAISY, and the W3. I occasionally debugged EPUBs running on various devices and reading apps. Which meant reading JavaScript and understanding the concept of frameworks. I stayed in ebooks until just last year when I made the leap back over to software by joining Deque as a technical writer who is just technical enough to be dangerous. I'm leveling up my JavaScript, Node, and other stuff these days. Especially github. Which is not as easy as everyone says it is when you've worked in CVS, SVN, Clearcase, and other version control systems. Git moves terminology around and re-orders the workflow enough to confuse people with old school version control backgrounds.

I'm also refamiliarizing myself with CLI's which I haven't had to use since the early oughties when I had a Unix terminal to work with instead of a laptop...

Any specific learning was done as needed, on the fly, and very occasionally, through a course or self-study. Lynda, Pluralsight, Frontend Masters, and the others didn't come along until very recently in my timeline. I was a beta Safari Books Online subscriber and a paying subscriber up through the first quarter of 2016.

Bottom line, growing up in a university library (my mom was the circulation lady) has its advantages. You learn how to find stuff. Growing up two doors from the computer geek family on the street (the dad was the first Computer Science PhD to graduate in my state) provided the advantage of knowing what a computer was outside of school. Macs were just becoming a thing when I started high school and my dad insisted I learn to type in case the viola thing didn't work out...

tl;dr: violist, typographer, learned to code on the fly as required, when required. Didn't have to live with mom & dad. I still play viola though. Mostly chamber music these days. I haven't decided if I want to pursue the "code by day, orchestra by night" lifestyle again.

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hisega profile image
Jesse Gabriel

"Code by day, orchestra by night" sounds like an epic introduction! Thank you for sharing your story! Very unique start and definitely memorable.

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jeankaplansky profile image
Jean Kaplansky

Thanks for reading! It is one of those stories that no one saw coming and can’t be made up!

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Steve Wiley 🥁

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!

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Nathan Dennis

My first actual exposure to code would have been Geocities. It wasn't anything but editing some HTML, but it got me interested. Years later I took a class on it in high school, and several years after that I went through a boot camp. Since then it's just been a ton of self-teaching (thank god for Udemy).

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Kim Arnett 

I graduated with a CS degree after changing my major 120 times.

Learned some HTML in high school.. didn't associate it with coding, didn't know what coding was. My idea of coding was something like code.org teaches today. I was always good with computers in general, but when it came to choosing a major in college for whatever reason it did not cross my mind as a feasible option.

Decided to pursue Chiropractic - learned Chiropractors have to work on cadavers and changed to a Ultra-sound Technician route. Took one class related to that, and repulsed, I changed to a Math major. Pursued that for about a year and half, then ended up accidentally taking an intro to programming class. I really enjoyed it and had some conversations with the professor, did some research on CS careers and never looked back after that.

I was way out of my element in the CS department.. never removed a virus (only downloaded them lol) or could even tell you the internal parts of a computer, but it all came the more I immersed myself into it.

Primary benefit I feel I gained from my degree is "learning how to learn" for myself. Other than that, on the job experience has been a way more powerful learning tool.

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Thomas Junkツ • Edited

I am a computer kid of the 80ies with a not so straightforward relationship to my current job as a software developer.

One day, my brother brought a machine into our living room, plugged it into the TV and started typing. After some hours he was done and proud of what he did. What was it, that made him proud? He typed the sourcecode (known at the time as a listing) into the machine and the result was: you could move an X which was your "player's characacter" and make it "jump" over "O"s which were supposed to be "Barrels". This was around 81/82 and I was about 6 or 7 at the time and the machine was a ZX81. This got me hooked. Short after that, I wrote my first BASIC program ("number guessing")

Then I made a travel across the computing landscape of the 80ies. The next machine was the successor ZX Spectrum which had a color display. Later: Instead of a C64, I bought the C128 (the "serious" machine) together with my brother. He used it for typing his business letters, I used it mostly for gaming. My friend too bought such a machine and we wrote our first textadventure (a bloody mess of print, input, if and goto). I was always hypnotized by the beautiful creations of "cracker intros" which is some kind of tech-demo and which evolved into what is nowadays an art form in the "demoscene". But to have a smooth scrolling text on the screen, you had to know how to program a thing called raster interrupt. In order to program this, you had to learn assembly language - which I mastered to a certain degree but was not really successful.

The peak was, when in the late 80ies the Commodore Amiga arrived - a machine, which blew my mind: It not only had great graphics and sound, it too had a graphical user interface ("intuition"). There I too did some steps in programming and made contact with the C language and with a meditating guru inside my box. But programming the Amiga seemed harder. Paradigms had shifted: object oriented programming slowly arrived.

With the rise of the PC in the 90ies and Microsoft swallowing the market, the AMIGA market and my interest in computing and programming declined.

When I finished highschool, I found another interesting field of interest: humanities, resp. philsopophy. So I went to college to study philosophy and german studies. But the latter was rather uninteresting, so I dropped out and got my first real job as a bookseller.

Selling books is a hard job which in turn resulted in me having several phases of unemployment in my CV. Somehow in the early 2000's I rediscovered my interest in IT. But I got my first job not until 2010. Till then, I used my spare time, reading books, learning things on the internet (tutorials, videos, blogs), listening to podcasts etc.

Since 2010 I am a professional software developer. And I am 99% self taught.

Do I want to add a degree to my CV?

I have to admit: I am too lazy for that :D

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Ben Sinclair

Your story sounds a lot like mine although I went the TRS-80 route after my zx81 instead.

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Sung M. Kim

I took a BASIC class for a week around 2~3rd grade and stopped as I didn't understand English (back in Korea because of RUN command.) 😅.

I was going for an EE (Electrical Engineering) degree in college, which required taking a programming course (Modula-3).

I couldn't stand 4 hour-long EE labs but found myself writing programs for hours and overnight. That's when I thought that it was what I wanted to do.

So I went for a CS degree 🙂.

My first job was a help desk position but a programmer at the company left abruptly so I volunteered to take his position and been programming since then.