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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Latest comments (35)
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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"
3rd or 4th grade, playing games on the Commodore 64 at a friend's house.
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.
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.
11 years. Saw the source page of a HTML page. Felt like a hacker from the matrix.
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🙊🙉🙈
When I built my first website and saw it go live 🙆
In my first coding job interview, love at first sight. I was 19.