I had enough common sense as an 18-year-old to know that writers and musicians need day jobs, but not enough to realize that I'd have been better off learning a unionized trade and becoming an electrician or a plumber. Since I didn't have the looks or the personality to make it as a rent boy in Manhattan, I rent out my brain instead of my ass as a programmer.
What inspired you to pursue a career or hobby in programming?
Submitted 11 months ago by mac@programming.dev to programming@programming.dev
Comments
starbreaker@kbin.social 11 months ago
coloredgrayscale@programming.dev 11 months ago
How was the process of learning it / getting good for you, as it can be really frustrating in the beginning?
PeeGee@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Ow - too accurate.
PepeLivesMatter@lemmy.today 11 months ago
I was good at math and bad with people.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
I’m neither good at math, nor good with people…
sour@kbin.social 11 months ago
programming cool
sheepishly@kbin.social 11 months ago
yeah pretty much
autokludge@programming.dev 11 months ago
I was apparently enraptured by PCs as a child, didn’t really do much apart from games / emulators until secondary school. at ~14 was offered an extracurricular class to learn how to program TI-82 calculators. This really clicked for me, ended up pursuing a heavy math / comp sci / stem curriculum. I get to automate away tedious / boring tasks by working on a mentally stimulating puzzle. The rush on getting it working the first time is 👌
314xel@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The rush on getting it working the first time is 👌
That’s so true, but what I think keeps us hooked in the game are the failures, the figuring out the "why"s.
seaneoo@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Definitely video games and wanting to make mods. Started off “making mods” in TorqueScript (I believe it was called?) when I was in middle school.
NikkiNikkiNikki@kbin.social 11 months ago
Wanted to make games as a kid, got way way waayy too into it, now I just make my own programs when I need to
314xel@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Reading as a kid about virus analysis and how they work in a short column in a… newspaper. Yeah, they even listed full Windows Registry paths. Didn’t know what HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE was, didn’t own a computer, only knew about some DOS commands, but I knew I wanted to be able to do that job and decompile stuff (whatever that ment) and see how it worked. Just like dismantling (and ultimately destroying) toys to see the inner workings.
After finally owning a computer and being bored by the few games I had on Windows 95, being limited to Notepad, Internet Explorer (without an internet connection yet; or was it Netscape Navigator?) and Paint (in which I sucked, lacking in artistic talent), when I learned that I can just type stuff in Notepad I borrowed a book about “programming” in HTML. Then Pascal. Made a simple XOR encryption program. Then Delphi naturally followed, making my own tool to track how many hours I’ve spent on dialup a month (yes, internet was very expensive) while listening to 80’s music on Winamp. Nothing was more interesting than that. The rest is history.
CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I always thought engineering is cool but time consuming. Programming was picked up along the way and now the money is too good to do anything else. Wish I could work on devices again.
DudeDudenson@lemmings.world 11 months ago
I’m really fucking good at it and since I’m in a third world country software developers make 10x as much as the average person here (while still making 10x less than someone in the US)
pudcollar@hexbear.net 11 months ago
I had a knack for computers. I wanted a degree that would keep me from being poor. I don’t like programming but I do it for money.
calypsopub@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Was majoring in accounting and had to take a CS101 class programming in Pascal. Changed majors immediately, thinking “Where has this been all my life?” This predates PCs, although I did have a Commodore 64 to practice coding on BASIC after that.
m105@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
I don’t know…I think I always had a passion for it. I always liked tech stuff and liked to play the computers. Built my first site at 13, after that another and another and so on…now I have 10 years of software engineering, worked with multiple technologies and frameworks along the way. Nowadays I work as a software architect at one of the largest companies in my country.
UtMan1988@lemmy.world 11 months ago
MISSINGNO.
Deceptichum@kbin.social 11 months ago
Games.
I remembering around 6-7 and being shown batch scripts and I knew I could make little interactive story/games with that knowledge, and I’ve been following that itch ever since as a hobby.
RandomDevOpsDude@programming.dev 11 months ago
jeebus@programming.dev 11 months ago
Back in the mid to late nineties I used America Online and the warez chat rooms. I found out Visual Basic was used to create bot programs and now I work for a big tech company.
sndrtj@feddit.nl 11 months ago
I got into programming via, I kid you not, Second Life.
Wanted to animate some objects with the built-in scripting language. Turned out I was pretty good at it.
Fast forward 15 years and I’m having a decade-long career in software.
jadero@programming.dev 11 months ago
I always read a lot. 100+ books a year, plus magazines. Then I got a job in the boonies and got home only on weekends. All of a sudden I was reading a book a day. Even with the library and used book stores, that was financially ruinous for our young family. So I bought a VIC-20, a used b&w tv, and the programmer’s reference manual to take out to the work camps… The savings on books paid for the system in just a few months.
One thing led to another and a decade or so later I made the transition from hobby to career. Now I’m retired and looking to reboot as a hobbyist.
silas@programming.dev 11 months ago
dis_honestfamiliar@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Such cool stories. You guys rock… Or are lying lol. I was once working in electronics job. I was running a circuit under test for which we had access to the source code for it. I was amazed by how source code turned into action. Once they out-source my job, I went to get CS degree. And… Now I work what is basically T1 IT
Graphy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I used to make bots in RuneScape. If I’m being honest post high school I had to pick something and just said fuck it CS degree
ruckblack@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
It clicked at a young age, I’ve been good at it and enjoyed it since I was like 13. Found out it was profitable a little later and yeah, that’s all it really took. Just the path of least resistance to be honest.
cm0002@lemmy.world 11 months ago
It was a natural progression for me, over the years I’ve gotten my fingers into a lot of pies across tech from running servers to REing and programming serves as a bit of glue to interconnect it all and then I fell in love with it.
But ONLY as a hobby, I know me and if I had to do it as a career day in and day out I’m not going to want to do it recreationally and the love and passion will eventually burn out. Although I do find areas to sprinkle it in in my career to make my job easier.
donio@lemmy.world 11 months ago
After typing in a bunch of programs on my 1KB Sinclair ZX-81 I wanted to understand how they worked and wanted to make some of my own.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Pretty much from the same era. Either you learned how to teach your computer to do stuff or you were stuck with an expensive paperweight.
thomasdouwes@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
Lnrdrople@suppo.fi 11 months ago
Yeah… Decades later I still sometimes think about making video games, but never have any time to do more than write down a quick idea. Maybe one day…
HIMISOCOOL@lemmy.nz 11 months ago
Rinse and repeat with all engines on the market
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
Lol, that was me. Took a course on game development and the professor said “I don’t advise a career in game development unless you can deal with crunch”. Now I treat HTTP requests in python and question my life choices.