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Discussion on: What's your coding origin story?

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Vishnu Haridas

It was the famous WinAmp MP3 Player for me that opened the doors to "coding".

It was a Pentium III running Windows 98. I was exploring WinAmp's installation folder and found a few XML files (didn't know what was that). I discovered that those files are used to configure the color and theme of WinAmp skins. I got curious, and played a lot with the XML, restart WinAmp to see the changes.

Then there was a famous HTML file that comes with Flash games, which simulates earthquake by shaking the Internet Explorer window. Somehow I discovered the "View Source Code" menu and discovered HTML and Javascript. I didn't understand that either, but I tried changing the numbers and seeing the results.

We got a super slow dial-up connection in 2000. I started looking at the source codes of websites, and started learning HTML. "Coding" looked very cool at that time, and I started investing time in learning how to "code" things up.

My first programming course was C++ in my school during 2003. That was the first time I saw an "IDE" --- a Borland Turbo C++ 1992 version on MS-DOS.

Later I self-taught Visual Basic 6 on my Pentium III machine, and later tried to learn Visual C++ with MFC but failed to understand the concepts.

Later in college we had 8086 Assembly and C. Assembly got my attention and tried some x86 assembly using NASM. Writing Operating Systems was a trend in online communities at that time.

The website "planet-source-code.com" has a major role in improving my skills in writing code. That was the times when PHP was so popular, and Macromedia Flash was the best way to build an interactive website.

Time flies.

Later in 2010 for my daily job I chose to stay with Java/Android, and now moved to Kotlin/Android.