Mine
8 years old; a C64; the sound a 5¼ inch floppy disk; things moving on the screen on my command.
What was yours?
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Mine was while I was playing World of Warcraft at around age 26. I got into creating macros and editing the lua code for the addons I was using. Then one day I decided I wanted to make an AutoHotKey script that would run keystrokes over multiple windows and I was hooked. Spent the better part of a full weekend working on a "five-boxing" script and realized I need to be doing it for a living. Was enrolled in school that fall!
Good ol' WoW macros. A lot of people probably don't even realise they're making basic if/else statements when making macros.
I can't remember how exactly I first got the idea to build a website, or purchase a domain name like hellhounds.com when I was ~10; Probably from playing too much RuneScape and wanting somewhere to show off what I'd done.
When I was coming towards the end of primary school years, my class were split in to small groups to work on a fake product, making brochures, flyers, cards etc. and due to already having a domain and hosting in place, I thought I'd make us a website. The teacher had no idea how it was all done so asked if I could stay behind after school one night when some parents were in to describe what I'd done. It was the moment I was telling them all how to structure HTML and CSS when I realised I had a genuine interest in it and how cool it was to be able to build stuff for the web.
The summer between middle school and high school, I participated in an EMSI program. I can't remember the name of the language or software, but I remember making a little turtle draw lines on the screen. That was my first experience with anything related to coding. Once in high school, I signed up for a programming class where I learned Java. I made a mad libs like program, just text in a command prompt. I enjoyed writing short stories then, so I would write silly ones and have my classmates fill in some blanks. The excitement that generated made me want to pursue creating programs that people would use and be equally excited about.
In secondary school (highschool), I would write .bat files for fun. I had dozen of "hacks" that I toyed with. When I got to CEGEP (college) I actually wanted to program video games but because of my poor math skills I went in web development instead. I have never regretted my choice!
I've worked and seen first hand what the video game industry does to you, and I decided that it wasn't the life I wanted.
Is really that bad, ain't it?
We testers did 6 days a week 10 hours per day. Some devs had a 6-7 days 10 hours shifts. That was often many months long, since it was a big company releasing many games through the whole year.
The situation seems a bit better now, but it's still horrible. I still work in the same building and everytime I see one of their devs they always seem sick and very tired.
I hope they fix their situation soon and stop preying on the juniors that think this situation is acceptable and required.
I honestly think we're all moving toward the wrong direction. The game industry is living in a speed-up productivity bubble very similar to the late 90's when, for the first time, a common employee started to count as mere gear within the system and big companies could do basicaly whatever they wanted in the name of new technologies.
I understand that we all have our role in this story, because of the demand process. Think of Amazon, for example.
I think we need to reorder things and no more accept money as the only valuable thing in our careeer.
Somebody showed me Emacs that was provided with Mac OS X 15 years ago. I was a student at art school at this time. I graduated, then did some programming training and am a full time paid Emacs user today.
Sébastien I have an unusual request. I'm learning French and I have a system. In this system I usually learn what I'm already familiar with. And you know programming, emacs and French! Would you be interested in assisting me in that journey? If yes then follow me back and we'll continue chatting in DM. Merci beaucoup.
Bien sûr! Pose moi tes questions par message privé.
Sure! Ask questions through DM.
Mine wasn't until I had a job as an developer, which seems strange. Before that, I was just going ahead with uni, and getting developer work because it was a lucrative field.
One day, I had essentially a day at work when I had nothing to do, so at the start of the day, I decide to automate a part of my job to make it easier, and I must have gotten up from my desk twice in the whole day. Before I knew it, it was time to go home.
At that point I thought, "This is quite fun actually"
It was when I realized University ain't for me and I need to find out what I'm good at. Then I realized I'm actually good with computers.
Wanted to learn how to repair laptops and mobile phones but I didn't do it
Decided to learn computer networking. While learning I read an article of how programming is the most in demand job in IT. I told my colleagues about programming they said it was very hard, programming is for genius only blah! blah!! blah!!!
I didn't listen to them. I was secretly learning C on YouTube but had no idea what I was doing 😂
It was after 4 months learning networking and 8 months of fieldwork. Get a job was difficult because you need CCNA,CCNP e.t.c
One day I was scrolling through YouTube saw a video of how a network engineer became a software developer and the demand of network engineer is getting low in today's world
Then Booooom!
I started learning Java
The rest is history...
Probably around the same age. My best friend and I used to talk about creating our own MMOs back then. Today, he's delved deep in to the world of linguistics, but we constantly bounce ideas off each other for various things. It really, really sunk in to me in my last retail/customer service job, when two things happened:
If that wasn't enough to kick my butt in to gear and get in to something better...I'd probably still be back there hating my job!
While playing Minecraft.. 😂
In the past I began to programm Java plugins and I had so much fun that I decided to learn an IT job! And here I am.
In my training I learned web developing and I love it until today! I'll never miss it! :)
I started my career with a Business Diploma and had originally intended to go towards "Business Analytics". Then I got so frustrated and bored from manually transferring data from one Excel spreadsheet to another during my first full-time job.
That's when I discovered the world of VBA, automate my work, started hacking together data dashboard in Excel and after earning enough money from that job to fund my studies, quit. I am now pursuing undergrad studies in Computer Science. 😄
Now directing my entire focus towards web development. The idea of having my future application being so easily accessible to people all over the internet excites me. Compared to just having a Macro-enabled Excel that's only available to the organization.
I decided to pursue functional programming after getting in an online English school as a tutor. I saw that they used angular as their stack and they have a lot trouble with that. They need to iterate their product a lot. I thought at the moment if they used Elm it would have been much simpler for them. I then started to think about where I really want to go in my life and decided to pursue FP. Before that I was in doubt that I could learn programming at all.
In 7th grade (at the age of 14) we had a CS class. I was doing some minesweeper clone in Turbo Pascal 7.0 and thought „I like this! I want to do this, when I am finished with school.“ Then I was going to study CS (which I aborted) and I finally got the chance during my first job, while still studying Business Economics. I was doing an evaluation of some ways to build a heterogenous system with Linux and Windows for a simulator used in Flight Controller education and my colleague came by asking me wether I a was able to program in C++. My answer was, that I did not have any prior experience with C++ but I can program in Delphi. But since the language is just syntax, I was willing to give it a shot.
So I got my first paid job after my studies as a C++ programmer and I wouldn’t miss it for anything. The learning curve was very (very very) steep. The architecture was in a peer-2-Peer setting with multithreading and direct hardware access.
I did my first polymorphism, reverse engineered a proprietary protocol and lesendes to love Templates (Generics in other languages) and asynchronous programming.
I changed employers twice since then and still love my job!
Exactly the same as yours!
10 PRINT "PAWEL"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
Before I played any game, before I even booted up GEOS, my father showed me the above and boy was I in awe!
It's funny how one of the first things you learn in programming is the infinite loop.
Honestly&realistically, when I fed up with the rarity of my first job. Less than 5% people I met ever heard of my job. I worked about 80h/w. When I was looking for overseas employment, there are only 9 people who has my old job in New Zealand. I wanted to do something that is on demand.
Stumbled across a framework called Konfabulator back in 2003. They claimed anyone could build these neat little desktop widgets. I took them up on their claim, full green noob! (I was a History major in college)
I built a couple. It was so much fun. It was the first time I'd ever written code; first time I'd ever seen something I built, work!
I was hooked. I actually didn't realize I was hooked for probably another 10 years. Second foray into codeing (web dev) stuck. It's my career now.
Back in elementary school, our Computer's teacher created a "Games Club" in the afternoon. We programmed games using Game Maker. He would give us some instructions on paper, and we would follow them and then watch things work and play with our creations. It was mesmerizing to see all those commands being turned into actual movements and actions.
Then in college, in one of my first programming courses, our teacher assigned us to create a Solitary game using java. Pretty hard for being an introductory course, although he didn't expect any of us to actually make it work. That's when I first remember to deal with the frustration of having to make something work and not knowing or understanding how, then having to research. One long night I managed to order the cards and show them in the UI, and I just had this feeling of accomplishment, after all the struggle it took... That's when I knew this is for me.
We were twelve and me and my closest friend somehow ended up spending our school vacation days trying to create a graphics based game like "Dangerous Dave" out in GWBASIC, albeit way simpler. Both of us were, as if, intoxicated - no idea how time flew, breaking our heads on coding out on paper, hoping to take the script to a computer coaching academy, typing it out and seeing how it works (my parents couldn't even afford to buy me a computer back then). Needless to say the game itself didn't work out, but something else much bigger, did ;) for the both of us.
1980, 7 years old, Apple II with Integer BASIC
Our school district started an accelerated learning school called "Summit" in 1979. I was part of the pilot class for that program, which started in by first grade year. My first programming class was in the 2nd grade on the Apple II. We wrote our little programs using Integer BASIC. I was immediately hooked.
I later moved to a C=64, which was a revelation. Color codes and those cool keyboard symbols? That was the business back in the day.
I was in my earlier teens and I was trying to write a Pokémon game in c. It was then I realized that it was cool if I could write games for a living. That is not what I do, but it is what got me started.
11 years. Saw the source page of a HTML page. Felt like a hacker from the matrix.
My dad was an accountant, so we got one a nice IBM pc for the home. My dad showed me some little programs in QBasic, and then I was hooked!
3rd or 4th grade, playing games on the Commodore 64 at a friend's house.
First dev steps:
I think the first time I fully realized the potential was when I built a message board for my secondary school year club in Perl. People could actually interact and share experiences through an online platform. That's when I came to understand that the web is actually for people
In my first coding job interview, love at first sight. I was 19.
When I built my first website and saw it go live 🙆
When I got my first job in the tech industry and saw all the developers working together, having a good time, and loved coming into work.
6 years old, holding a GameBoy in my hands. The choice was made, I never looked back.
I've got a blog post about my journey here on dev.to with more details if anyone is interested :)
In Sept-Oct '18, when I was hacking on shopify codes. I realized I was an undergraduate in CS and could study programming again. And viola, now Im a freelance developer🙊🙉🙈