I've seen quite a lot of posts on Twitter recently about how people got into coding and there are some really interesting and even wild ones, real career divergents.
'Oh yeah, I used to be a lion dentist and then just learned React and went from there'
'I won the 1998 figure skating championships but now I'm a Python architect'
...and so on.
Joking aside, I once worked with a genuine medical doctor who just pivoted into being a top sysadmin...mental!
But, my origin story is much more beige: I literally worked with computers from about 4-5 years old, learned to code and became a developer....the end.
What are some of your development origin stories? Where did you come from? How did oyu get here? Where are you going?
Latest comments (59)
I started building with HTML on Geocities when I was a kid, in grade four. My parents were upset about it, but I kept doing it anyway 😂 I stepped away from it a bit as I got older, but started blogging on Wordpress in 2012. I was still doing my own code here and there or helping out with other people, and used my background to cobble together sites or updates for the (non-tech) companies I was working for.
In 2014 I got a support job with a tech company, and started taking relearning coding more seriously. This year, I started taking Superhi courses, which have been really fun!
I was introduced to programming by my Dad in '98. I kept asking for new computer games and he gave me a book on creating your own games in Turbo Basic. I did try them out, kinda liked it, made a somewhat barely working Digger clone (for reference).
However, my life took a hard turn after that. The computer was sold, my dad was switching to another job. Spent the following 15ish years doing something else. I was into music and arts for some reason. I ended up taking Biology as my major instead of IT.
Last year of my bachelor study, my Dad convinced me to go back into programming. It wasn't easy since the passion was there but there was a ton to pick up. I studied hard, was hooked into online webdev tutorial for a few months. When I graduated, I managed to get my first job as a web developer. Spent there for a year and joined Piktochart afterwards, and here I am, doing frontend stuffs instead for the last 5ish years.
I would say it's quite a roller coaster ride, but it is really fun!
I don't know if I count as I'm not there yet. I've had a potted non-it career due to mental health problems of which I'm just coming out the other side. 2 years ago I read somewhere about the need for web developers and stumbled across freeCodecamp. I had a play around then drifted away. Then maybe a year ago I made a more concerted effort but found myself like a beached whale after struggling with javascript and wrote myself off as unsuitable.
However, having read much about attitude and hard work mattering as much as anything innate, I got back on the horse this year. I'm back at javascript which is going a bit better this time but I've also just begun supplementing fcc with Colt Steele's udemy course to really hammer home what I'm learning. This time next year I want to be applying for junior dev posts.
I was getting my teachers license. The classes weren’t offered every semester but the pay difference between licensed and non licensed teacher was so big it wasn’t worth getting a job, so I had a lot of time on my hands. My friend was planning a conference and it annoyed the crap out of me that every day she would have a human log into google forms and make sure no more than 30 people signed up for a class, for over 100 classes. I thought there had to be a way to automate that. Learned python and Django. Made her a site people could use to sign up, check in, etc. Kept going. Made several more Django sites for myself. Now a few years later I’m a full time backend dev and I’m about to take on more freelance coding not bc I need the money, just bc I like it and want to do it all the time.
Awesome! Nothing fuels learning like necessity!
I had never heard about programming until 11th grade when we used Scratch and some other drag and drop software to program robots. Even then, I didn’t realize that it was programming.
I spent 6 months at home after graduating from high school thinking about what to major in. By pure luck, I happened to take one last look at the list of majors (before settling for finance) and saw software engineering which sounded so cool!
I registered the following week and started my Intro to Programming class using Java 😁
I have always liked computers, they always fascinated me. So one day, it was in November of 2015, I was bored, and I ál of the sudden thought, "wouldn't it be cool to learn to code?" And so it was. I did a quick search of "best programming language for beginners", and I click clicked the first link, which was a list of the best languages, if I remember right, and the first item on that list was Python, so that's what I learned. I'm glad I did.
My first interest in programming was when our school got these personal computers for us that were expensive little tanks with about as much power as a leapster. I was bored and found the command prompt window and decided to start messing around. At first I made a simple choice based adventure game, but eventually the chat application my friends and I used had been block by IT. So abusing the school's file sharing server I made a batch program to allow us to message each other from anywhere in the school. Quite the little rebel, we'll just say the tech department kept a close eye on me.😉
I've wandered in and out of coding for 35 years and have worked as a limo driver, a credit analyst, a dental assistant, and bunches of admin jobs. Now I'm a web developer
And how is web development for you? Is this your career to end all careers?
I'm working on a degree and hopefully towards data science. I do love web development though
Used to play Minecraft as a teenager, started administering a server, eventually started creating plugins in Java, then a website for the community.
1992: 7 year old kid with an old Commodore 64, no games but a manual for Basic. 1994: IBM PC with Win 3.0 and QBasic. 1997: QuakeC. 1999: Half-Life level crafting, and C++ Allegro.cc games. 2008: Phone-tech support for a small software company. Lead developer told me to take a look at .NET, but I wasn't a Microsoft fan. 2011: Hired as a .NET developer in same company.
Been working there ever since. Future? To improve I need more insight into how other dev teams work. But I just haven't been able to find somewhere new yet. I like the small company I work for, the people there, and the freedom I have there.
Spent time playing online games ~5th grade. Quickly got into forums/bulletin boards (Proboards anyone?) to discuss my nerdy habit; which quickly turned into wanting to build my own. Had to learn Photoshop and Javascript to make any of this happen. Luckily I found more forums to discuss design and programming. Having a community helped a ton. As probably most people I got interested in computers from video games!
Was a van driver.
Bitten by a spider.
Study/built profitable site.
Then much more.
Reached the stars.
Saw all.
Icarus loop.
Hibernate. Cave disturbed.
Back to change some things.
Then farm.
I was 13 or 14, I don't exactly remember when I created a blog and then tried to customize the theme. After Customizing, I wanted more so I searched it and that was the time I knew what a website is! That brought me to joomla and since it was hard to learn, I met wordpress and suddenly I found myself translating wordpress themes. I didn't stop there and learned about wordpress development. This was before the college. In college I learned some more serious programming stuff and actually I get to know machine learning and AI! That was the time I married somehow to python and we're having a good life so far!
I've been a CTO ever since.
What's the formula here?
Someone suggested I make this an Instagram story. Instagram is something people use right?
We will use this formula for growth for epitsim civics ecosystems. thx! be back soon. ;-) Wonderful story. Thanks for sharing!
ignore parents = true. Hahahaha tough one in India than all the others xD
The best way to convince your Indian parents to let you work in the web-dev industry is to append both Doctor and Engineer to the end of your to your web-dev title eg.
😏
Hahaha very true.
When I was at high school (late 90's), using Amiga Basic, I made a basic wireframe 3D renderer and a couple of cellular automata simulations. And that was it for 20 years. I only got Java 101 while studying Industrial Engineering at college.
After college I became a professional musician for about 15 years. 10 years I was live on stage and the last 5 years I did solely original music and sound design for video games. During while I got interested in Unity 3D and start experimenting. I was using Javascript those times.
Then together with an artist friend of mine, we made a cool installation for a big painting fair using Kinect and Unity 3D. That helped me land some remote prototyping jobs.
I noticed that almost jobs and documentation were all about C#. Remembering my Java base from 20 years ago I switched to C# by porting a couple of my personal project prototypes. Since then I'm a full time freelance Unity 3D developer (3 years and counting).
Wow, one of the best pivot stories ever. What an interesting path you’ve took. What sort of music did you do? Anything we can go listen too?
It feels sometimes refreshing, sometimes contrasting. Honestly time to time I feel like I lived the lives of a couple of different people compressed into time, as what you do for living defines you as a person in a lot of ways.
Thanks for asking. Here the first page is mostly my independent works. Scrolling down you can see plenty of my game music spread over a range of genres.
soundcloud.com/guneyozsan