I'll go first. Honestly, the first time I touched a computer was when my parents brought home an Apple ][ Plus computer at around 1986 I think it was. They had no idea how to put it together. I took one look at it and figured out how to hook everything together and it was like magic.
The video featured above, although not my own, resonates perfectly with the thrill that surged through me at that moment. The feeling was simply electric. Alongside the computer, I was presented with a set of four programming books on Apple Basic and some software. My curiosity led me to dissect and understand the code visible on the floppy disks.
In my excitement, I modified and personalized the pre-existing commercial software by editing its code. Although, on one occasion, I messed up with a program due to the absence of undo options in those times. However, every step of this process felt like magic and marked the inception of my journey into the world of development.
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Top comments (45)
Two moments stand out...
the first was building a geocities website to showcase my LEGO mindstorms robots (I'm using that word generously) and emailing "webmasters" about how they aligned text next to images (spoiler: it was CSS "float").
The second was creating an AOL instant messenger bot (again, generous) that was a high schooler's patchwork of different Perl libraries glued together until it could respond to very specific commands like
/weather [zip code].The magic moment for me was when I created a website for my alma mater's food pantry. This was during a time where I was in a CS undergrad program but I didn't know what I wanted to do. After this project I decided to be a front-end software engineer.
What was your first tech stack?
Not really a tech stack, just made it with simple HTML/CSS and a little bit of JavaScript. I was beginning to work on web development, so I was trying to learn how to make a website from scratch.
Sounds like pancakes, that’s a stack!
Didn't think it was a stack lol, but thanks!
Back in 2008 (I was 12yrs old), I use to play a lot of online games, I was curious about how online games were made and I investigated a lot, then I started creating my own game, first with JavaScript, then I was programming in java and c#, by 2012 I started downloading and decompiling SWF of online games, to change the server URL in the client files, pointing to my localhost and then started creating a server emulator.
After a while I found myself and some friends in an online community, investigating how to apply
Logjam exploitin the Diffie–Hellman key exchange to perform theMan-in-the-Middle attackfinding 512-bit primes used for connection encryption (we nailed it), and I started intercepting and decrypting packages via a proxy logger, so we can now create accurate server emulators for online games with TLS encryption.After that, later on ... I became a software programmer, creating and securing servers from attackers (like I used to be lol).
I bought my first computer around 1983
I writen my first dual player spaceship arcade game with z80 assembler, used tape recorder as storage device. Every times need to be load assembler, and writen code before do any improvement on my program. Before execute good to save, I remember the voice of binary datas.
But the magic moment which is lead me to be developer is around 1977 when I saw first start wars movie as 8 years old boy. After movie I created startegy game from paper. Smaller spaceship is 1x1 cm, galaxi is around 1m2 board - also from paper. Really easy rules turn based "galaxy war" was my first "project". Maybe somtimes I will recreate that game online version.
Wow I took a Vic 20 home from school in 1982 and write my first game of pong. 😉
That sounds so awesome! Thank you for sharing this!
I wrote this related article where I say that there is NO external gatekeeping that makes sens for being a "real" developer.
Like for playing piano, the real test is whether you are ready to put all the necessary practice
The question is not whether everyone SHOULD learn programming.
The real question is whether YOU really WANT to keep programming for the long term
"Everyone Should Learn to Code" is Bullshit
Jean-Michel Fayard 🇫🇷🇩🇪🇬🇧🇪🇸🇨🇴 ・ May 3 ・ 4 min read
My first coding experience made me become a coder. It was with Logo. Seeing simple line creating boxes, circles etc was very amazing for a 8 yr old me. Earlier I used to play games only never bothered about how it worked. Creating game type designs with simple words was amazing experience for me.
In order to finish and graduate elementary school we had to prepare a big project that we will defend (not only IT related). As I was in love with WoW back then, I've created a board for my guild to schedule raids, discuss things etc. I liked the thing so much, I got immediately hooked on programming, chose an IT-related high school and I'm programming since then
I always loved computers since I was a kid, but I also wanted to study medicine since I was a kid, I chose medicine, I realized I had made a mistake when I was half way through my career but I decided to finish either way.
After 2 years working as a physician I decided to change careers and the magic moment that made me say "This is it, I found my passion, I want to be a programmer/developer" was when I built my first website, a portfolio page for my freelance translation projects, using only HTML and CSS ❤️
I was trying to find myself and my purpose..... i had no idea what career path i wanted in life. till i went for a computer training at a cyber cafe. i was really interested and decided to study computer science in college... still in college and now i'm a junior developer. It was the best decision i ever made.
Ugh I hate the word junior developer. You’re a developer! You’re one of us :)
There is definitely merit in that position, but consider some counter arguments about why having the distinction of "junior developer" is a good thing.
I'm not saying that either of us is right. I just wanted to temper your stance by pointing out some of the benefits of the distinction between junior and senior developers.
proudly a DEVELOPER!!!!! thanks for the correction
A magic moment for me was after damaging a laptop I had in my backpack after taking a fall. The laptop had a touch screen which had become cracked. The damaged screen thought it was receiving touch inputs along the cracks, which made the cursor snap over to it.
At the time, I didn't have much money so I wanted to avoid repairs. The laptop had a Linux distro installed on it so I did some research and wrote a script which would disable the touch screen when the laptop would start. Writing that script made it so I didn't have to get a screen replacement. That's when I realized just how useful coding can be as a skill.