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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Oldest comments (45)
That moment never occurred. I just left a programmer.
Did you say Hello World upon ejection??
Yes... It was written (punched) within all my projects... :)
got pics??
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, thatโs a stack!
Didn't think it was a stack lol, but thanks!
This started me on the path (probably around 1981):
And this gave me a turbo boost in 1983:
Wow this is such a memory trip! And so freaking late 70โs early 80โs.
This
and the 'computer programmer' module my father bought.
Oh wow Iโve never seen this. What is it? Did it hook up to a tv?
Philips G7000. It was a gaming console and was just connected to a TV. The games came on cartridges. But there were special cartridges like one to create music (with an overlay foil to change the keyboard to a piano--like layout). Then, one cartridge was called 'computer programmer' and when you started that one the machine just greeted you with a cursor. In the manual were some programs to type in... I did that and started modifying them (i.E. breaking them) and learned assembly along the way. Oh, btw, I was nine back then...
neat. Do anything cool post breakage?
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.
That sounds so awesome! Thank you for sharing this!
Wow I took a Vic 20 home from school in 1982 and write my first game of pong. ๐
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 ๐ซ๐ท๐ฉ๐ช๐ฌ๐ง๐ช๐ธ๐จ๐ด ใป May 3 ใป 4 min read
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. Youโre a developer! Youโre one of us :)
proudly a DEVELOPER!!!!! thanks for the correction
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.
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 DiffieโHellman 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).
The magic moment for me was when my dad showed me how to ask the computer to count to a million and beep. It blew my little kiddo mind when it beeped just a few seconds later.
It wasn't printing the numbers then. Oh wait, it might still get away with that in under 30 seconds depending on the era of course. Shouldn't confuse my dad with yours ๐. I'm pretty confident my first machines might have taken a minute or more to print the numbers 1 to a million
Of course even then if we only wrote out say, every 100000 (so, 10 numbers) a few seconds would have sufficed I think. Early day optimisation ๐.
now it's like a microsecond lol.
I wish I could go back to those amazing times. We are warlocks and warriors behind the keeb.
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].