Mathematics but self educated programmer since childhood. I'm my experience, at least for my generation, the best software engineers I've met were all self educated. I grew up, studied and worked in Greece and then moved to Belgium to work with Belgium, Dutch people of the same age group and always the best we the self educated. But the best of them all were people who were into this from childhood, playing games as well as hobby programmers. For the younger of us, back then there were only books and no cloud based on demand advanced services. A database was something to do last when going pro.
I always laugh when my friends who are in the field for a much longer time than I am are telling me how they used to learn coding. Which was by using books and copying by hand insane amounts of lines. Sometimes the book would have errors in the code and they would spend hours or maybe days, just to realize that actually the code is wrong and they didn't make a mistake. We have it so easy nowadays when it comes to resources.
My first attempt into c from a book ended up with rewriting the basic hello world example as I could not understand what the problem was. I first learned basic.
A year ago I attended a meetup about readable code. This young person was explaining why many code conventions don't help and he was right. Afterwards I asked him how old he was, he said 20 and then in the first time in my life (at 41) I used the "in my times" card and felt so old. In did this to explain to him that there is a reason for many of things here was complaining about.
I love creating! It started with Lego as a little kid. Later I went on with (dis)assembling my first computer in the early 2000s. Then came the internet... Working remotely for 8 years :-)
Yeah, another mathematician! I've as well started very early with playing with computers (gaming, but also tearing it apart, writing small scripts,..). I've work a bit in mathematics as a researcher, but figured out, the most fun was implementing algorithms in Matlab rather than inventing the algorithm on a piece of paper. Did several Udacity Nanodegrees and here I am as a software developer :D ... I think coming from mathematics isn't a far stretch actually.
To be honest if was my choice because Greece had and still had a very bad system of figuring out what your studies will be. Honestly there are not many options for mathematicians to do mathematics in Greece outside academia and was become teachers which is a pity. So, I was passing thru and did it like kind of a chore.
Many years later I understood how helpful it had been. The domain is an absolute training for abstract thinking which is super important in computer science and for the world in general. I always had a tendency to logic and I liked physics more second to computers but studying mathematics (Greece had one of the best and most demanding schools on theoretical domains) was a process that so much fine tuned by inert ability to do cold logic and I felt the difference in the second part of my career.
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Mathematics but self educated programmer since childhood. I'm my experience, at least for my generation, the best software engineers I've met were all self educated. I grew up, studied and worked in Greece and then moved to Belgium to work with Belgium, Dutch people of the same age group and always the best we the self educated. But the best of them all were people who were into this from childhood, playing games as well as hobby programmers. For the younger of us, back then there were only books and no cloud based on demand advanced services. A database was something to do last when going pro.
I always laugh when my friends who are in the field for a much longer time than I am are telling me how they used to learn coding. Which was by using books and copying by hand insane amounts of lines. Sometimes the book would have errors in the code and they would spend hours or maybe days, just to realize that actually the code is wrong and they didn't make a mistake. We have it so easy nowadays when it comes to resources.
:)
My first attempt into c from a book ended up with rewriting the basic hello world example as I could not understand what the problem was. I first learned basic.
A year ago I attended a meetup about readable code. This young person was explaining why many code conventions don't help and he was right. Afterwards I asked him how old he was, he said 20 and then in the first time in my life (at 41) I used the "in my times" card and felt so old. In did this to explain to him that there is a reason for many of things here was complaining about.
Yeah, another mathematician! I've as well started very early with playing with computers (gaming, but also tearing it apart, writing small scripts,..). I've work a bit in mathematics as a researcher, but figured out, the most fun was implementing algorithms in Matlab rather than inventing the algorithm on a piece of paper. Did several Udacity Nanodegrees and here I am as a software developer :D ... I think coming from mathematics isn't a far stretch actually.
To be honest if was my choice because Greece had and still had a very bad system of figuring out what your studies will be. Honestly there are not many options for mathematicians to do mathematics in Greece outside academia and was become teachers which is a pity. So, I was passing thru and did it like kind of a chore.
Many years later I understood how helpful it had been. The domain is an absolute training for abstract thinking which is super important in computer science and for the world in general. I always had a tendency to logic and I liked physics more second to computers but studying mathematics (Greece had one of the best and most demanding schools on theoretical domains) was a process that so much fine tuned by inert ability to do cold logic and I felt the difference in the second part of my career.