Submitted 1 year ago by meter_kilo@lemm.ee to programming@programming.dev
To give some context, I’m a developer myself and once I had a conversation with someone who has not “tasted” programming, but was wondering about passion and career. I was asked what I like about programming. My answer was that my interest in it came from writing small scripts when I was young to automate things.
Aside from being a career, I’m curious what got you into coding ?
Having an electrical background I noticed a lot of logic disappearing into code and still wanted access to it. Also, virtualisation and emulation are a lot cheaper to run.
I worked as a network engineer and got pretty frustrated working with outdated applications that were not user friendly. Once I became a supervisor, a large part of my job became writing and generating reports summarizing events that happened on the network that no one would ever read. I wanted to learn programming to automate the things I hated about my job.
I’m still an engineer, not a developer, but I enjoy writing user focused programs that reduce or eliminate worker frustration. As with many jobs, it’s not the networking that’s difficult, it’s all the other bullshit you have to do.
Also, learning how to parse, model and visualize data can really help you make your point to your management and get your ideas pushed through. Also a great way to earn brownie points with your bosses, as managers tend to love graphs.
Wish I could say it was a passion for me but I really learned out of necessity.
I wanted to be an animator, specifically for video games. I made all this cool art and animations in flash, but I had no way to show it off in a game setting. So I learned Action Script 2 to make flash games with so that I could show off my animations. Turns out, I suck at art and animation. Oh well! I ended up liking the coding part more anyway.
Getting old, “broken” computers running Linux was the first thing when I was about 11 or 12 years old. Then:
Often this involved programming. Eventually I found out that companies pay money for this kind of thing.
But now I’m finding it difficult to find work which aligns with those original values. Getting paid means delivering what people will pay for, not necessarily solving problems. What got me into programming is probably what will get me out of it (profesionally, anyway).
look mommy programmers
Decide@programming.dev 1 year ago
For some reason in middle school I tried it and, for obvious reasons, couldn’t figure it out. Then in 2012-2014 Reddit kept telling everyone to learn Python. I failed that and kept trying randomly for 10 years. I’ve only recently begun making progress in web dev, which is deliberately avoided because of Reddit language opinions.
Ignoring all of that, I really like text editors for some reason, and I’m on a journey to make some. I still haven’t made any, but it’s a goal.