In 1982, I took a summer BASIC programming class at our local Firehouse in Gladstone, OR. They had a mix of Commodores, TRS-80s, TI-99's etc.
Then I eventually got my own Vic-20 and C-64 and after that I was always surrounded by computers. I did a little programming here and there. I was always ahead of my teachers for every computer class I took and usually became the teacher's helper who helped other students.
My career started when I learned HTML in the mid 90s. A data entry job for Randstad turned into an HTML/Web application job writing a web-based benefits entry system....that was back when we used hidden frames to maintain state. Things just snowballed from there. My familiarity with BASIC made VB and VBA second nature, and suddenly I was an Access/Office programmer. I learned OO code when working for a company doing Powershell. I had to work with a development team to create a Microsoft word document generator. The web part was all in Java, so I had to learn to read Java...which eventually led me to JavaScript and C#.
Then .Net happened and my resume just kept getting bigger. Today my penchant for learning fast has put me more on the integrations side of things, but now I'm learning frameworks in order to get back to the UI side.
To answer the question, I guess I didn't really choose it, I just fell into it...and I don't even have a college degree. Sometimes your career is just based on something that's become part of you. The logic behind writing code is just something that I started breathing. :)
My teacher had us doing guess-and-check style math equations that all had similar inputs, so I essentially built a brute-force algorithm to do all that (frankly bullshit) work for me and being the kind and generous altruist that I am, I shared this life-changing piece of software with all of my friends in the class.
My teacher caught wind of this and told us we had to now show our work.
Well instead of doing that, I tweaked my algorithm to print out intermediate steps (wrong guesses, etc.) and proceeded to not have to do any work from that point on.
Wow, I'm surprised by all the responses. I am going to put it into a future post, but I'll answer my own question.
My dad (and later I) worked at IBM, so I've always had access to technology. I had a PC in the mid-90s with Windows 95 and a book on C, and since I knew most PC games used C++, I read through the book to learn how to program in an IDE. My science fair project was probably the first computer science project that year--a text-based game.
A year later, my 5th grade teacher was learning HTML, and as the editor of the school newspaper, he forced me (at my mom's insistence) to write a tutorial on making websites. I started web development 6 or 7 years later when I had a server to play with.
This month I've taken a hiatus from programming, so the most technical I am today is either doing computation finance in R or helping with programming homework.
At first I wanted to know how to build a basic website, so HTML and CSS. After that, a little bit of Batch scripting on Windows to make PCs shut down at school to have fun (childish I know but fun at that time).
Then, I started to question myself. I've always been a gamer, and I got curious to know what being on the other side of the screen feels like. So I searched on the internet for programming languages for beginners. Ended up having to choose between Java and C. Java looked hard with all these "class" things and these long method names, so I chose C.
I built some little things with C and spent some time to understand quite important but at first sight complex notions, like pointers and memory allocation. Then I tried learning Python because it looked cool and dynamic. In the end I've not done much with it but it was fun to see that such easy languages existed.
After entering an engineering school I've studied Java during 3 years, and more recently C again (which felt easy this time) and C++. Then I discovered the magic of OCaml and never stopped loving this one haha !!
Programming is really nice, a lot of languages exist, they are all different and useful in some different fields. That's what I find magic ! Everybody has its favourite technology and does great things with it :)
I started programming in 1979 on a TRS-80 Model 1. I wanted to write some games. And that was kinda fun.
Then I started writing software for my High School... I thought about studying art, but I didn't want to get an undergrad, then a masters' only to teach art in HS. So I quit art, stuck with CS.
30 (gawd, nearly 40) years later, I'm still here. And I started making art again.
Latest comments (31)
I needed money to go clubbing.
In 1982, I took a summer BASIC programming class at our local Firehouse in Gladstone, OR. They had a mix of Commodores, TRS-80s, TI-99's etc.
Then I eventually got my own Vic-20 and C-64 and after that I was always surrounded by computers. I did a little programming here and there. I was always ahead of my teachers for every computer class I took and usually became the teacher's helper who helped other students.
My career started when I learned HTML in the mid 90s. A data entry job for Randstad turned into an HTML/Web application job writing a web-based benefits entry system....that was back when we used hidden frames to maintain state. Things just snowballed from there. My familiarity with BASIC made VB and VBA second nature, and suddenly I was an Access/Office programmer. I learned OO code when working for a company doing Powershell. I had to work with a development team to create a Microsoft word document generator. The web part was all in Java, so I had to learn to read Java...which eventually led me to JavaScript and C#.
Then .Net happened and my resume just kept getting bigger. Today my penchant for learning fast has put me more on the integrations side of things, but now I'm learning frameworks in order to get back to the UI side.
To answer the question, I guess I didn't really choose it, I just fell into it...and I don't even have a college degree. Sometimes your career is just based on something that's become part of you. The logic behind writing code is just something that I started breathing. :)
Because I wanted to make an operating system 😅
To avoid doing math homework 😂
My teacher had us doing guess-and-check style math equations that all had similar inputs, so I essentially built a brute-force algorithm to do all that (frankly bullshit) work for me and being the kind and generous altruist that I am, I shared this life-changing piece of software with all of my friends in the class.
My teacher caught wind of this and told us we had to now show our work.
Well instead of doing that, I tweaked my algorithm to print out intermediate steps (wrong guesses, etc.) and proceeded to not have to do any work from that point on.
Because my crush back in high school was taking computer science as her major.
(This was back in the mid-90s).
Wow, I'm surprised by all the responses. I am going to put it into a future post, but I'll answer my own question.
My dad (and later I) worked at IBM, so I've always had access to technology. I had a PC in the mid-90s with Windows 95 and a book on C, and since I knew most PC games used C++, I read through the book to learn how to program in an IDE. My science fair project was probably the first computer science project that year--a text-based game.
A year later, my 5th grade teacher was learning HTML, and as the editor of the school newspaper, he forced me (at my mom's insistence) to write a tutorial on making websites. I started web development 6 or 7 years later when I had a server to play with.
This month I've taken a hiatus from programming, so the most technical I am today is either doing computation finance in R or helping with programming homework.
At first I wanted to know how to build a basic website, so HTML and CSS. After that, a little bit of Batch scripting on Windows to make PCs shut down at school to have fun (childish I know but fun at that time).
Then, I started to question myself. I've always been a gamer, and I got curious to know what being on the other side of the screen feels like. So I searched on the internet for programming languages for beginners. Ended up having to choose between Java and C. Java looked hard with all these "class" things and these long method names, so I chose C.
I built some little things with C and spent some time to understand quite important but at first sight complex notions, like pointers and memory allocation. Then I tried learning Python because it looked cool and dynamic. In the end I've not done much with it but it was fun to see that such easy languages existed.
After entering an engineering school I've studied Java during 3 years, and more recently C again (which felt easy this time) and C++. Then I discovered the magic of OCaml and never stopped loving this one haha !!
Programming is really nice, a lot of languages exist, they are all different and useful in some different fields. That's what I find magic ! Everybody has its favourite technology and does great things with it :)
For the fun, at first. Later for the monthly income and then everything went "wrong".. :)
Wanted to become l33t h4x0r
I started programming in 1979 on a TRS-80 Model 1. I wanted to write some games. And that was kinda fun.
Then I started writing software for my High School... I thought about studying art, but I didn't want to get an undergrad, then a masters' only to teach art in HS. So I quit art, stuck with CS.
30 (gawd, nearly 40) years later, I'm still here. And I started making art again.