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?
Oldest comments (59)
I think I first got interested in computers because my dad was... but my parents were separated and I actually didn't have much time with him, so that interest never really got nurtured.
My true origin with coding was Geocities, and it wasn't an abstract interest in coding, I was most fascinated because some 9th grade kids in my school had created a little "online business" through Geocities and I thought that was the coolest thing.
I was in 7th grade. We didn't have a computer at home at the time, but my friend got into Geocities to make a website for his band, so I spent a ton of time at his house and school computers creating my website, which was a fantasy sports news site.
Amazing! I loved Geocities. I also cut my CSS teeth on MySpace, incidentally where I met my wife. I like to think it was my epic emo-styling work on my MySpace space :D
Honestly I learnt how layouts work by playing with Myspace profile. I was a musician so how it looks was very important for me. That's why I spent so much time on it. I don't regret now:)
Did you know the musicians were running macros in the browser for views at the time?
As a kid I played games on PC a lot. They (parents and the rest of the family) said that I was addicted and that being on the PC will never bring anything positive in my life. I said that I will one day earn for living using PC, they laughed...
Typical dev story right here :D
Pixel doll forums, I wanted to showcase my little pixels so I had to learn how to code a website, luckily for me, other members had tutorials on how to make them. Girls teaching girls. It was fun during that time.
After that, I went to university and learned how to truly program/code/develop/that and at work I learned my limitations and areas to improve (which I'm working on) :3
So here I am. I think my origin story is pretty fluffy lol
That is such a fluffy, wholesome story :D
Growing up in the 80s, my parents owned a computer because of work. They had some games and let me play... but I was limited to 30 minutes Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It was one of the computers that had a system disk, then load MSDos, then change the floppy disk to the application/game one... and that took time out of my 30 minutes! I learned how to create a small menu using batch files, so I could save some time instead of typing all the commands. I don’t know if that counts as programming, but it definitely was the door to it.
I was at 7th grade, a lot of my classmates had Nokia cellphones that could access the Internet. They started playing online games and it was super fun at the moment because we were all new to this. A female friend of mine had a cellphone with a T9 keyboard that she always let me and my dude borrow at break time.
We tried installing some games but failed as the phone didn't support Java. So we Googled what Java was, and it led to the "wap" sites where my friends downloaded games, and then there were some forums where people guided how to create a wap site.
2 curious boys started the journey from here. We learned the basic structure of an HTML page. We screamed like crazy when we made the text move on the screen with the tag, or when our tags had gradient CSS background. All that with a borrowed cellphone at break time!
2 years later I got my own cellphone. It had a great feature: QWERTY keyboard! I coded on my phone, without looking at the keyboard! I contributed to a wap forum which helped people who were creating wap sites. I became an admin there. Those feelings of helping people, solving their programming problems, being responsible as an admin of a forum... are precious! There were nights I didn't sleep just to chat with my friends there.
Now I am programmer, work my dream job but I'll never forget my past. So motivated whenever I reminisce it back.
Wow, that’s amazing; to think it all started with a phone. That’s some right I’m on the ground floor level stuff 😎
I think mine is quite boring but it really changed my life.
I always wanted to do engineering of some sort. I enjoyed maths, physics and science in general. However, there are a ton of engineering disciplines and could not decide which one to follow.
My dad, just mentioned one day, a few months before making my university application.
He gave me a C for dummies book (probably not the best for a noob). I made some basic app, like a tax calculator, something like that. I flipping loved it.
I then did some VB stuff which was making the colour of a window change. I was sold.
I put together my uni application and haven't looked back. I thank my dad for a lot of things, but I think this one tops everything else. Just one comment that he said to me, about a profession I never considered. Completely changed my life.
I love software and can't imagine doing anything else now. Man. I feel like I'm getting emotional saying this stuff.
Thanks for sharing that, a great story. I think I had that C for Dummies too! Far too deep for me, C is a dark art so hats off to you for persevering.
Haha, I didn't stick to learning C. As you said, a bit hard. I'm actually surprised I managed to enjoy playing with it as my first attempt at programming.
I stuck with it for slightly longer than I should because I wanted to make games and it was the thing at the time. But like you UI moves to VB.Net.
I was very passionate with photography, "street" especially, i wanted to own a Nikon. I dropped out of college, and couldn't afford a camera. I basically started designing websites to earn shills to buy a Camera. And now Im coding for a living and also bought a good cam. I always hated Code. Now Im actually kind of amazed all the time how there is something new in this field everyday.
Im a Full stack dev and recently started looking into ML.
Sometimes I find myself helping a lot of people to get into programming, and sometime I also find some of my best clicks featured at many websites(sometimes here too), best of both the worlds. One ending advice, how fad of it, is, dont drop out. College does help in putting your perspective right. Self learning is cool but a lot of quirks need a teacher.
Then drop links to your photography here!
Generally release them like kind of open source
On unsplash bro😊
unsplash.com/@_imkiran
I received a radioactive web-crawler byte...
(I'll get my coat)
Ahhhh see what you did there 😂
Ewwww. It's leaking goo. You may want to get that looked at.
(Here's your coat, I just keep mine on)
coderstory.io/interviews/experienc...
I will admit my story goes through a lot of changes so it all started back in high school whereas a Senior I wanted to major in Culinary Arts thinking that I would be the best Chef possible and one day own my own restaurant.
It wasn't until my parents and I went to a local culinary arts school in the city and after the tour discussed out tuition and payment plans where things started to get intense. After the adviser broke down the tuition costs and fees my parents needed to sleep on it because it was an expensive school at the time. That next morning I woke up and my mother was waiting upstairs in the dining ready to talk to me about their decision and what she thinks is best. Basically she told me that I would not be able to attend that school due to the high tuition costs and at the time I didn't know how to drive so I would have had to catch two buses to get to the school (This was worry some for my parents since the school was located in Baltimore City). After she laid down the bad news she handed me a community college page that had a list of majors to choose from the list. At that point, I was upset that I would have to change majors but I didn't want to put any stress or burden on my parents.
As I was looking through the list of majors I saw Game development listed as a major and decided to enlist in fall 2013 as a Game Development major. After the fall semester, I took a semester off to work for a bit and get money to pay for my next few semesters and learn how to drive. Coming back fall 2014 semester, my mother had another conversation with me about the longevity of being a game developer which made me do some research into job prospects of game development within my state and in general. As I saw game development wasn't something I wanted to do anymore since it was an industry that I didn't want to do long term.
During my winter break, I decided to do research and logical reasoning to see what major I could switch to before continuing in the spring. Luckily I found out that game development was a subcategory under the world of computer science! And I then came across software engineering which made me super excited when I researched more about it. After that, I changed my major to computer science! The rest is history, ever since then its been a long bumpy road through this major and occupation/career path but its all worth it! I have to thank my parents and especially my mom for pushing me to evaluate my life choices carefully and ultimately choosing one of the coolest and best occupations ever!
TL;DR:
Basically, I changed my major three times starting at Culinary Arts -> Game Development -> Computer Science, my mom was the source of reasoning for changing my career path.
Brilliant, thank you for sharing your journey. It’s so nice to hear parents that guide you based on some evidence rather than because they don’t like it or think it hasn’t got a future. It’s so interesting learning about other people’s route and none of them are the same ☺️
Started to make anime sites around 6th or 7th grade. This was like 2001-2002, using Homestead and Geocities. It kinda escalated from there. After page builders, it was taking page source from other websites and making it work how I wanted to modifying PHP scripts. Ended up doing some freelance web work after dropping out of college and was fortunate enough to to land a junior dev job with a marketing firm.
I love that time period! For me it was Geocities and FreeWebs (IIRC).
In middle school I started out by working on an Animal Crossing fansite with some folks I met on the Nintendo forums. Someone else handled the hosting and everything, but I had access to create content via a WYSIWYG that let you drop down into HTML. I learned some rough, early 2000s HTML this way. I'm talking things like
<table>s for layout, inline CSS styles, background MIDI music, etc. Later I moved on to a Runescape fansite (😂) and helped contribute some Java applets, but still the same sort if deal.Unfortunately my rural Midwestern high school didn't emphasize tech very much as a viable career path so I decided to go into the sciences -- so I started my undergrad as a Biology major with a pre-med concentration. During this time I didn't do much, if any, coding.
A few years in I realized that I really wasn't interested in becoming a doctor and the thought of four more years of school to become a pharmacist really wasn't appealing. Then one day I saw a magnificent feature-length Daft Punk music video called Tron Legacy.
This sounds kind of dumb, but it reminded how much I used to enjoy computers and the (very basic) coding I had done as a kid. It inspired me to reach out to a CS advisor late in my Junior year. So I did that and decided to try double majoring in Biology and Computer Science. This was pretty late in my undergrad career so tacking on CS meant taking a 5th year and really cramming in all of those required classes.
I regret not having a chance to do any software engineering internships, but I was able to get some initial experience by:
A bit of a roundabout journey, but now I'm here. If you've read this far, sorry for the wall of text! 😊
Hey no apologies, these stories are awesome and it’s so nice that a lot of people have a winding path. My friend did a similar degree but didn’t get into the exciting world of web development.
I also love that a lot of these stories involve the weird and wonderful early era of the web with Geocities and MySpace and such. What a time is was to be alive
In 1979, my buddy got a Vic-20 for Christmas. We started learning BASIC with it, then decided to make a "dogfight game" - which today would be called a "flight combat simulator". I was hooked. I became a programmer, he became an aeronautical engineer.
Neopets!! Yes!! Another classic gem from the roots of the web. Love that you somehow fixed the site. Worrying, but love it!
It may be the destiny, if there is such thing :)
I was always attracted by tech and I loved to be surrounded by it. I was never really the "How it works underneath" type of person until later.
On the other hand I was lazy in school and slow learner so I ended up in culinary school and worked my 20's in the industry as a chef.
Best decision I made was to get back in the tech world and I started learning web dev. Fast forward, I quit my job, got into the online school and here I am now, reinventing myself.