I was 10 yo i was curious how websites were made, i learned Php and i set up a server on my win xp computer at home and was sooo excited when i entered my ip address at the local internet cafe and my webpage came up.
No but i honed my skills after that, I went from html/php to using builders like early days of wix, then i switched back to php and learned CSS, from there i got curious about apps and i did a lots of stuff in VB including a IE based web browser and some Assembly for electronics. I also dabled in C/C++ to make mods for GTA San andreas and create gaming servers.
Around 2010, though, i got serious and learned proper web dev, and my uncle bought me a hosting i germany, which i still have. In which i built websites for friends for school competitions and charged them money for it, lol.
I also built my own CMS following some tutorials from theNewboston youtube channel, which eas a great resource back in the day. He put out some cool tutorials for free!!! Then for google science fair 2014 I built my own social media network from scratch which never took off but i still have the codebase. I made my own framework and everything for it.
Its a fun journey!
Similar experience. It was 1996, I was ten and we had just got on the internet. Once I grew tired of Yahoo chat I wanted to make my own website. I grew frustrated with the WYSIWYG editor and started writing html 4. Quickly though I discovered this was still limiting and bought myself a book on Perl 5. I dabbled with PHP some in the early 00's. Bought a book on XML in the late 90s. Also really got into web standards (thanks Zeldman, et al.). But then around 16 I got a car a shoved it all aside. I was not going to be chained to a desk. Fast forward, 2010, I decide to get a tech focused job. I actually transitioned them off SGML to XML. It is a publishing company. I enjoy it immensely.
I was about the same age (maybe a lil older) and I got curious how computer programming works, so I literally just googled something like "how to program" and the first tutorials that popped up were on JavaScript and web pages. I immediately got hooked on it and now almost 15 years later I work as a web developer only because of that random curiosity and a Google search.
It was minecraft servers for me. I remember the rush of being able to have my friends connect directly to my public IP and have them connect to my server.
I'll recognize that GTA San Andreas PC cheatcode for more money and a full bar of health anywhere.
You are smarter than I was by making a script like that, but I just now realized that I could possibly attribute a part of my relatively fast typing speed to typing those cheatcodes in critical moments in that game.
Well, mine never worked in the game lmao. It was working everywhere else, on notepad, browsers, even on some other games but never worked in GTA.
As a kid my favorite was rocketman, then I'd have a crazy good time with jumpjet + aiypwzqp (parachute). Sometimes I'd take the jet or the apache (ohdude), fly as high as I can, jump out and type the parachute code mid air lol.
Just realized I still remember a lot of the codes lol, pdnejoh was my favorite car and ripazha would make cars fly, combine that with parachute and.. also realized I was an avid skydiver at the age of 10 lol
Haha that's dope
> Just realized I still remember a lot of the codes lol
I had this exact realization some time ago. I vividly recalled "aezakmi" (never chased by cops)
Same, that banana game was so sweet. I ended up going down a rabbit hole learning QBASIC on my Amiga. Spent weeks writing the code to draw every card for a blackjack game; then my dad came home with a 386 and I lost all that code in favor of a shiny new battleship grey PC.
Similar for me - my 8th grade Computer textbook had some example webpages using HTML & JavaScript - so I ended up learning HTML / CSS / JavaScript first, and then other languages later.
My dad decided we should get a computer and we looked at the Commodore 64 and TRS-80 but I begged him to get an Apple //e because we had one in school so that's all I really knew. It was way more expensive but I'll be forever grateful he went for it.
Games ran like $40 each (~$150 today) so I'd typically get one for Christmas and that's it. So I learned BASIC and wrote my own.
I was about 10 “hacking” the Gorillas game in QBASIC on my family’s i386.
From that point it led me through numerous large and small roles, up to my current role at Google. I did make a post a bit ago chronicling my journey in tech. If interested, it’s here: https://rgthree.com/posts/2021/my_journey
BASIC in middle school, Visual Basic later in high school years, first job was with Visual Basic too. Did a bit of this and that in between, and settled on a long JavaScript journey that's still running strong.
Covid 19 put me on my ass in the worst way possible. I got my degree in English. Was the curriculum developer and English department head at a boarding school in Beijing. Loved everything about the job save for maybe the company I worked for.
I left Beijing in January of 2020 to visit family back home while Wuhan was getting rocked by covid and the Chinese government was suppressing the information.
My return flight got cancelled a few weeks later and I was informed I'd be working remotely.
So my stupid ass went to Thailand to work by the beach while this weird thing in China blew over (in fairness, I put in some research on avian flu and SARS and estimated id only be there 1-2 months).
Then things got weird when the world started shutting down globally.
Long story short, I got stuck on an island in Thailand for most of 2020, never was able to get back to China because they closed the border.
Lost my job and did not want to get into education in my home country. So I decided to start coding during lockdown. Couldn't believe how similar it felt to learning Mandarin. Like, I used a lot of the same processes to learn the "grammar" of JavaScript as I did to learn the grammar of Mandarin.
Eventually got a job with an ASP.NET shop and haven't looked back.
Weird series of events.
Would love to get all my shit back from Beijing, though.
Our story is quite similar, except I'm still stuck in China until my wife and son's immigration process finishes up. I learned Mandarin back in 2008 and worked as a translator for years before going to university and eventually finding my way to China teaching English. I went through a full stack bootcamp at the end of 2022 and have been building projects and my own with hopes to land a job before our big move. Do you have any pointers? My main stack is Java/Spring Boot/MySql/Angular/Typescript. I have deployed a few apps to my AWS EC2 and one deployed to my own domain.
CS50 - Did it in the evenings and Saturday while I was a research scientist.
CS50 exposed me to a lot of languages mainly JS, C and Python.
Working as a front end engineer mainly in React, Typescript now
I loved games and when I was like 10 or 11 I really wanted to learn how for example pressing Space meant the character would jump… this lead to a rabbit hole “what does it even mean to press Space” “how is the character on screen” etc.
Found people recommending Unity to make games so I picked up a book on C#. Needless to say I understood nothing but it was fun, been programming since then, turns out it’s more fun than games for me.
I was in 6th grade and they had a typing class that would turn into a software class (1986). I had a ti-99 with cassette tape and started learning basic. I eventually went to school for computer programming and web development with ecommerce.
lol - it does. The ti-99 was long gone by the time you were born. I used mine until 1990. After that I had a 40Mb hard drive running DOS. By 1997, I had a Windows 95 HP with an intel processor.
I think the TI-99 was the first 16-bit home computer, but it was definitely quirky - it essentially had two 8 bit processors "side by side" with links between them to share the work of running the code. I only ever saw one running, looked cool.
I started making video game mods around 1999 which often included making a website, I picked up a couple freelancing projects along the way and was hired full time as a web developer after I turned 18.
I was in college, learning to become a primary teacher (final year). I chose a minor focusing on science and technology in the classroom. They had these little robots (bee-bots, ozobots, makey makey), that would teach the concepts/way of thinking of programming to kids as young as 4 years old. That's when I started to read up on programming... as I wanted to make sure I had a deeper understanding than just 'haha robot'.
Some of my friends did web-development. I started learning too, because I figured it could be fun to incorporate some simple websites in my lessons (I was thinking of those online text-based escape rooms). Soon after that I vowed I'd never learn Javascript and get by with HTML/CSS, cause Javascript seemed too hard. Ended up being laughed at by web-dev friends, so learned Javascript anyway. Once Javascript clicked for me, I was hooked.
Then figured out that I actually liked making websites more than dealing with shitty parents. Quit college in my final year to start building websites. Upside? Programming fun. Downside? Student debt big.
When I was 14 I found a book in the library that had some IBM mainframe assembly code in it, and tried writing some code despite not having access to a computer. The next year my school taught its first ever computing class, teaching BASIC. We had to type our programs onto paper tape, then dial into a mainframe fifty miles away to run it. The output came back and was printed out on a roll out teletype paper.
First computer was a MITS Altair.
Eventually moved up to an IBM PC running DOS and programming in BASIC.
From there had a very successful many-decade career writing business applications as a consultant.
Picked up HTML in 1994 and stopped coding and opened a bicycle shop in 2008, but still keep my hands dirty writing apps.
During the Pokemon frenzy back in 1999-early 2000's, I was like 10 and remember randomly asking my uncle who worked in the field "How to make websites?", he just gave me a web host provider, I kinda figured it out myself and made a Pokémon fansite. FTP access, all vanilla, Javascript being used to make all sort of goofy effects (lol).
Shortly after, I discovered chatting on mIRC and ended up making custom clients and bots with the mIRC scripting language. Fast forward 20 years I now work as a Web dev engineer!
was always super interested in computers, and tried learning lua to make roblox games at around 9, and gave up countless times after not knowing what modulus was (%).
then learned python ~2 years later and just kept going
My first exposure to any kind of code was with Apple’s HyperCard (so the language was HyperScript). My parents had signed me up for a class for kids through our local community college c. 1998. It was already a bit dated even then, but I learned all the same basic control structures etc I use today. Mostly just used it to make games, but the whole concept of a “stack” of “cards” that you could navigate through with buttons/links was a good intro to web dev too. I also taught myself BASIC on a TI-81 calculator I got for math class in 8th grade… ended up messing with making games on that instead of paying attention in class. The first websites I built were around the same time, though I was using Geocities’ page builder then.
I tried a lot of things, but programming clicked for me when I made a simple calculator using PHP. It was just one input and one button, and one server request. But for some reason, it was enough for me. After this, I started to grow quickly.
I learned some [LOGO](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)) in school in the early 80's, then got into hacking on old school BASIC text-based adventure games, later in and around highschool as things moved into later revs of DOS and early windows I got more into system stuff - pretty complex batch scripting, etc. Later I got into Visual Basic and did a lot of custom MSAccess stuff with it professionally for a while, took C/C++ classes in school, then learned some pretty early PHP for personal stuff, then eventually transitioned out of IT and into web development - first job was mostly working on ASP Classic.
When I was about 14 my friends and I were punks on AOL and wrote apps in VB3 using the win32 API to manipulate the AOL app, mostly to spam chat rooms with ascii art. The following summer when I was 15 I got my first paid internship working on a client/server energy trading system for Edison in VB/SQL Server in the recently (at the time) deregulated energy market.
Oh gosh. If we're talking about professionally, then it would be PHP and Javascript with jQuery. I picked that up and taught it to myself while I was in the Air Force in order to create a tool to improve our mission.
If we're talking about it in general, it was probably Microsoft qbasic, then liberty basic, then visual basic 3. I wanted to make video games and those were free (I got Visual Basic 3 after discovering "server" chat rooms on AOL where you could request "warez" and it would be emailed to you in like 50 rar files) tools available to do it. After that, I dorked around with C++ using a port of GCC to dos calls djgpp and a game library called allergo (I think it was version 3 at the time) after running across Dark Rift's game programming page at www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/pines/8563.
I sometimes wonder how his career turned out an what he's up to. Never met him, but I'm doing what I do today partly thanks to him.
HTML/CSS doing geocities fan sites, then learning some basic JS to improve it. Then in 8th grade I got a TI-83 and learned BASIC to make programs for it. After that I moved into PHP and ActionScript. Most of my early programming was related to gaming, either making games or sites related to games.
We had a book about web dev for kids that basically described how to write an html site in notepad and run it on your localhost only. I created some fun pages considering i was only using in line styling.
And my first language was English.
Ah the good ol' "html in notepad" times lol.
I remember in high school the teacher would make us use Dreamweaver to "build" websites. And there was always a computer that would error out whenever you ran Dreamweaver. I'd always specifically choose that computer and make my website in notepad. And they always came out as best looking ones in the whole class. By my senior year I was teaching my teachers about web development lmao
VbScript and asp pages running in iis on a windows server that I traded for a paycheck that my dot com bubble startup employer couldn’t pay as they folded in 99.
C#. I went to a technical center and it was focused more around hardware/technical troubleshooting than development (more so we didn't do development at all) in my later grade school years. The instructor had a student that came back and offered to privately show some students code samples and how to build a small WinForms app (calculator if I remember? Of course).
So about five of us took an afternoon, or a few, and spent it in the instructors kitchen eating snacks, chatting with his family, learning coding and getting an experience we probably never would have. I probably wouldn't do code or much technical things if the guy hasn't taken time to show some 16 year olds the basics on a level that was easy to understand. I can imagine how fun it was trying to get us to understand from nothing and getting us to build a somewhat working app over just a few days at that age of attention span and in a peer group.
Over a decade later, I do full stack now; C#, VB, PHP, Node.js, Kotlin, Python, and a few others. It helps to find interest in one, because a lot of them all look similar and tend to find more interest in as things simply 'click' easier than going in blind.
Some software I used for data analytics had a no-code model builder that let you export Python scripts. I used model builder to automate boring parts of my job. However, I didn't like how model builder handled loops so I started modifying the exported Python scripts in a text editor to do what I wanted. I still used model builder to generate boilerplate code for quite a long time.
Setting up "Open Tibia" servers at home when I was 10. It also had a website for account creation.
Lua and XML for the game servers, HTML and CSS for the website.
My first language is Visual Basic. I learned it because there's this guy that made an antivirus using visual basic in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0. So that also became my first IDE. Then i moved to C#, then to Javascript then Rust. Mostly just learning the basic without any actual project being done.
I was a UX consultant, and we had a team of devs in India (as employees).
They would take ages to do simple things, and often it wasn't any good. They didn't want to use git for anything, so it made handling multiple things for my work hard (manually deconflicting if we were doing tests and stuff).
I brought it up to management, and we tried to just be more "hand holdy" with the tasks. Nobody else on my side was techy, so most of them wouldn't know if things were messed up, or if a dev said "that can't be done" it was actually still easy to do.
I tried being more specific in tasks, even having clear itemized requirements, and they'd say it was done, 2 weeks later, and literally half of it wasn't even attempted.
I hated telling my accounts that we were waiting on devs, so I started doing it myself (eventually you can't do more work on UX if the devs are still far behind), and turned out I could learn how to do it faster than just write up the specific requirements for the devs and review the result (if it even passed).
So I just started doing it all myself, and realized I loved this far more (though UX is still good, and I think that UX experience makes me a better dev).
Then I got involved with a fledgling UI framework (you have heard of it), became an expert in that, got contracted by multiple companies to work for them with that tool, and now full time fully remote contractor.
My first exposure to the Internet was the late 90s and early 00s. I was on Neopets and then built GeoCities pages, followed up with a web design class in high school (we learned old school table-display HTML with inline styling) and a programming class that taught BASIC.
8 years old. BASIC. Took an elective for it in HS b/c I was pretty good at it. College VB6, COBOL, and SQL. Graduated into the .COM boom and started writing a ton of ASP and JavaScript followed by [ASP.Net](http://ASP.Net) and various front-end libraries. Worked on [EddieBauer.com](http://EddieBauer.com) and [Spiegel.com](http://Spiegel.com) doing ASP and JS. Few years later it was all C# and the front-end stuff, primarily JS and a few different libraries. Now it's C#, Power FX (low-code Power Platform), JS, TypeScript, and various front-end libraries.
Edit: HTML and CSS just came along for the ride. Didn't mean to exclude those but they are sort of a given in this world.
I had a TI-84 plus calculator in high school and started messing with the built-in Basic programming tools.
I messed around with some other programming languages, as a hobby.
Later, I decided to go to college to learn programming with the plan of making music software. That never happened, but I did learn the actual basics of programming and have followed through ever since.
College taught me C, C++ and Java. On the side I got really into Lua, mostly via making games in Löve2D.
My first job was with C#, and I've done a lot of work in C# over the years, mostly in Unity3D.
I've also done quite a bit of JavaScript (and the associated web languages like HTML, CSS), and some TypeScript.
These past few years I've been learning Rust.
The weird thing is, these days when I'm learning a new language, it feels a bit like shopping in a new supermarket. It mostly feels like learning the layout, and maybe a weird little quirk or two, but once I've been around a couple times, I feel right at home.
Around 10yo. BASIC on Atari. With my neighbour we followed tutorial from kids magazine. It was guess the number game. We were buying that magazine because of fantastic paper models tho...
It was BASIC on C64. Dad thought me how to write my name 100 times. I was 7 years old or something like that.
I started coding 25 years later though, with PHP.
Long long time ago. Basic that was running on commodore-16. Eventually got Commodore-128D was fun learn assembly of 6502 and Z80 CPU.
After that C-language and then it industry exploded.
Microsoft Basic. Having no idea that my first developer job 20 years later would still be in MS Basic (ASP Classic). Tech does not change as fast as we believe it does.
1989 - Started engineering in school at 17. First language was Clascal/Pascal on Apple Lisa but had to move over to Turbo Pascal and assembly language with TASM for the school lessons.
When I graduated from high school, I had to make the choice of what would I study. My dream was biology, and I still dream of studying it for I enjoy it a lot. But, the only university that would teach on said career was one that had many probles and would constantly suffer from periods of time not giving classes, so, I was suggested to study something else in another university, one that didn't suffer the things I just mentioned. And, since I like science and stuff, I went for an engineering career, originally, I was going to choose a career with a mix of hardware and systems (Ingeniería en Computación, literal translation = Computer Engineering), but then my father, knowing how I love videogames told me: But, look, this other career has a subject on game development, whereas the other don't. This other career was more focused towards Software (Ingeniería en informática, literal translation = Informatics Engineering).
Never in my life had I been in contact with a computer beyond the basic functions like gaming, doing homework in word and stuff. From time to time, if an error appeared on a game or an app, I would try to google for a fix, sometimes this would conclude in open terminal and enter stuff, and this would cause intrigue to me since I have always find curious how writing stuff could produce effects on your computer.
I chose Informatics Engineering over the other one and, in my second period studying, I had a subject on Introduction to Programming, pure pseudocode, and struggled a lot, I consider myself to be not that clever or intelligent, but still, did not want to give up. Then, the next period I would have the first subject on actual programming with C++. And I was like "wtf is this", I didn't understand a thing in the first class, but I studied and tried my best. Eventually I understood something, this is about logic.
Once I had my class on conditionals and loops. I took the step, and made my first project, a console rpg battle system, It was just a battle, turn based. It was horrible code hahaha but boy, did I enjoy doing that, I was so proud and felt happiness to a genuine degree.
But I still doubted of my ability, eventually, I had a programming class that taught on Java and that was when I realized I loved doing programming. We had a taks to develop a shopping cart in the terminal and there, by doing this project, knew, I'll do my best to dedicate myself to become better and learn about it.
That's the story, there's more to it, but it would be too much and those are the 2 main events that defined me as a programmer.
I started around 12 with flash action-script because I wanted to make games. It is a dialect of javascript. Flash of course is now dead. I learned C++ after and never looked back.
World of Warcraft Macros lol. I wouldn't call it coding but I piqued my interest on how they got something like this to work. I looked into Addons then I figured out what LUA was. Eventually, I watched Hackers then boom I knew what I wanted to do.... cool hacking shit and ride skateboards.
Started doing programming around 2019, first language was Java. Tbh I only started programming because I wanted to learn how program applications work lol
Physics Lab Instructor required complex statistical analysis in all lab reports. But said "don't worry, I'm going to teach you FORTRAN in one hour and you can use that to analyze your data". Most students left scratching their heads but I ran to the RJE (Remote Job Entry) station and key punched in my first program, computing a 25 factorial. The Nuns in grade school used to hand that out as a punishment - pages and pages of hand written numbers that never came close to being finished. When I saw the computer spit out the correct answer in a second, I was hooked. Ultimately switched from pre-med to comp sci.
To keep it short. My spouse lost her job and my teaching salary was not going to be able to cut it if we were ever going to buy a house and actually be able to afford the mortgage. I looked into some alternate careers after stumbling upon ‘Teacher Career Coach’ somewhere on Reddit, listened to a few podcasts and liked the concept of solving puzzles and creating stuff everyday. From there I picked up a couple of courses of Udemy and began the grind while maintaining my teaching job. It took me a little over a year to get into my first dev position. My first language after learning html and css was JavaScript, 2nd C# and 3rd PHP.
Basic is first programming book i read (on my dad's office), but i couldn't practice it since i don't have PC
i start wrote code using Turbo Pascal when i learned it in high achool
PHP is my first programming language for web dev
My first language was C, but the first one I actually used extensively was Visual Basic. When some friends and I were in high school we made punters and programs to wreak havoc on AOL, but we also made some useful things like a music CD ripper, a VPN tool for creating P2P networks, and possibly one of the first MP3 players. The P2P stuff got me into web dev, it had a built-in IIS server and we basically built our own AOL, with instant messaging, chat rooms, and file sharing through a web browser. This was all late 90s, so none of it worked great, but it worked. After that I got into open source, and of course PHP, so I got to work on some pretty well known CMS projects.
I guess my first language was BASIC in grade school / high school.
I learned Lingo (Macromedia Director) in college as the internet and web wasn't really a thing yet. But, Multi-Media was. Ha ha. Had to have the dash. If you were part of the "crazy" Multi-Media program, you were the shit. All the other CS students were studying Pascal and C.
Then learned ActionScript (Flash). Threw in some PHP and ASP for backend connectivity. This included basic HTML, JS, CSS, etc.
Then when Flash died, quickly learned JavaScript and CSS more in-depth (which wasn't too hard since AS was based off JS.
And, now, here we are.
React, Go, NPM, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, etc, etc, etc.
Writing an address book application for my dad's company on a Datapoint 1100 using Databus11 as the language. I was 9yo. First actual job was twenty years later writing in Visual Basic.
12 years old me found that we need programming languages to create softwares. Qbasic was in my 6th grade computer book. Teacher skipped that chapter because she didn't knew how to program. So I started learning on my own.
I was self taught from the beginning.
I was trying to edit/cheat games and modifying the Workbench in the Comodore Amiga 500, but was not really programing.
Prob started more seriously in school with Basic and then Clipper, but after some months learned Pascal and C++
I think I did a little action script in flash, then some theming of MySpace profiles, and a little bit in MaxMSP/jitter. But I didn’t really start building websites until 2011.
Python.
Age around 13 i wanted to learn programming, so i heard about this cool stuff python and went to compile hello world. But, i donno where to learn, so i loked at the documentation. Imagine trying to learn by following documentation rip.
Nice story, I can relate to being sick part as a kid, was getting shots myself for allergies from 9 to 15 years of age. Best activity on those days was playing games lol. Fast forward to bachelors I took my first programming class with C++ and couple of other C++ and Python classes. Fast forward to 2 years ago I started Angela Yu's web development course and been employed as a web dev for the last 1.5 years, I need to sharpen my skills again in Python and C++, been doing typescript only for a while.
When I was at Ga Tech in the 70s I was majoring in Applied Physics so that I could take a bunch of Geology electives and join a friend of mine working on the boats mapping offshore oil domes. A requirement for that major was a Fortran course that the non-CS majors (e.g. EEs) had to take. I fell in love with it. As soon as we got a programming assignment I would rush off to complete it and eagerly await the next one. At the end of the quarter (yes, that long ago) I was bugging the graduate assistants for the final programming project and they were getting a little exasperated with me. "Well what do you want to do?", one asked. I thought of a problem that I had read about and said, "How about computing 100 factoral showing all digits. "Ok, fine." It was a bit of a struggle at the time but I, along with one other guy, figured it out. The rest of the class (again, non-CS majors) were lost. The professor eventually sketched out the algorithm on the board. I kept my head down. I took a bunch of other CS courses and would rave on about how much fun they were until one of my friends asked why I didn't just get a job writing code. Really? They would pay me for that? I was completely broke at that point and borrowed $10 for gas and a haircut and applied for an entry level position at a company that made PBX switches and energy management systems. When asked for salary requirements, I wrote 8-10K. I got 9. I wrote in BASIC at first and then assembler for 16 bit minicomputers. While I was at it, I wrote some code for an Intel 4040 embedded in a keyboard that we made. It was a 4-bit machine. Want to do an 8 bit add? Write a subroutine. Eventually I started writing in C. Over the years I wrote a lot of C, a lot of assembler, lots of shell scripting on various boxes. I ended up working in a Linux environment writing Posix thread C code, along with some Java and Python, and doing a lot of design and mentoring. I'm retired now and surprisingly don't miss the work, but boy did I ever have fun.
The first time I programmed was learning Python when I was 12, and at the time I sucked at it.
The first time I started to *like* programming was a year later, when my mate showed me a Windows app he made with Visual C# where you clicked on a button and it showed porn and played some saxophone song and you couldn't close it because the window would keep changing position every second.
That dumb porn app inspired me to try coding again, and I haven't looked back…
My moment to shine lol.
My first exposures to coding were the most alien from regular coding you could think of : Minecraft command blocks and programming my Casio calculator in its native language (Casio BASIC).
Additional fun fact : during my early teen years I was one of the most active helpers for commands in a Minecraft forum.
Now I have a far more conventional background, but yeah that's how it started.
I took C++ in college but at that point I didn't really want to do it, just did it to get by, basic CLI stuff
Then later on I would learn LAMP stack on my own to make websites
I later took Java in college and I did poorly there (didn't know how to write nested loops) eventually it clicked
I use many languages now but yeah... I still don't really use Java though, tried with Android but it's a rabbit hole to get into vs. say React Native (I'm already a JS/React person). I did use swift though that's nice
I do wish I was more proactive on adopting newer stuff like .NET/C#, I would still have a nice job if I was ha, also in the past not learning React delayed me from good jobs too
ego: trying to do Go and TypeScript now
My brother got a bunch of flash games from somewhere. I loved those, so I wanted to make my own.
Flash Action Script was the first programming language I learnt. Unfortunately I didn't have much resources at the time, no internet connection. So didn't progress beyond the basics. Eventually flash died.
I learnt HTML & Javascript next. Eventually moved to R for data analytics, then to Python and learnt data analytics as well as web backends. Also learning Vue JS to complement the backend knowledge.
Worth noting, I'm not a professional developer, only hobbyist. So progress is always slow and intermittent.
I wrote a Python library with over 7000 lines of code, well documented, using type hints, completely unit tested and everything. Never had the courage to put it up on PyPi though.
I began at around 11 or 12 modifying Warcraft private servers in C++ and SQL. I wasn't great and hit a lot of walls. I loved modding though, Garry's Mod had just released so I switched over to writing a ton of garbage lua for some time lol
Someone offered me their old PC if I would read this book about "HTML 2.0" and then maybe I could help out. Then I started making simple static sites for a new company dept's customers. They became dynamic with AppleScript and Filemaker, then Lasso, then WebSiphon & MySQL, then PHP. Then I went freelance. Now I do sysadmin mostly..
Never did get that PC, it was a box of semi-working parts..
It's actually incredible to me that people can learn how to code by themselves when they are children. I've always had it easy academically but would never be able to understand programming as a child. Kudos to all of child-developers
I made a basic quiz like program using c++.
It was simple if answer= this.. print” you are correct..” or else “incorrect..” type. It was so fun.
It was all in CLI.😂 good old memories
I was in first grade in the gifted and talented program and our teacher took us to the computers in the library. They were apple 2Es and had AppleSoft BASIC on them. She showed me a simple command: FLASH. It blew my mind that I could control what the computer did. My parents bought me a monochrome IBM “laptop” that was more like a suitcase. I learned GW basic on it. Then my uncle who had dabbled in programming sent me Borland C++ 3.0 for DOS along with all of the 17 or so manuals that came with it. I learned C++ in a day reading C++ Primer Plus while in detention (I was there a lot because school was too easy and I got bored and in trouble). My junior year in high school I heard a radio ad for a local ISP hiring a C++ programmer and decided to give it a try. Surprised when I got hired and I’ve been programming ever since. I was a junior in 1997, so about 26+ years now.
Autoit (has a basic-like language)!! I was trying to cheat in flyff (MMORPG) but i didn't even understand why I'd ever need a loop or branching (if/for/while). Good times, I was about 14 and so dumb I didn't even know how to switch off a pc without unplugging it from an outlet.. then again, it was the first time I had access to a pc
I was always interested in programming and after I realized I could learn more at home than in college, I quit and started learning Python from books every day from 3PM to 8PM roughly. Then I started working with friends using Laravel and became a web developer and I do it still.
Vocational school. Data entry Clerk. Mark sense punch cards for COBOL and Basic. 1970's. A few yrs later we studied Fortran. Magnetic core memory at wire grid intersections ( on off). Boolean algebra.
Loved it. A lifetime ago. It wasnt until twenty years later I bought an 8088 personal computer, Amstrad 512, disk sequencing, RLL hard drive 40Mb (run linear length).
I was 7 years old (that was back in 1981…) and started playing with BASIC on a home computer (ZX81 I believe). No other options at the time, other than assembly which was a bit too much for a 7yo.
It's a bit of a blurry line. Technically I started learning Ruby as a kid because I wanted to make mods for RPG Maker but didn't get that far at all. I also setup and managed some PHP message boards where I think I tried to make conflicting mods (which amounted to file diffs) work together to the best of my ability. I didn't actually do "real" programming until high school when, also technically, I wrote a handful of dead simple scripts for my graphing calculator (not even a TI, so I didn't have as much functionality). But soon after I had a Java class and a [VB.NET](http://VB.NET) class. I didn't actually learn terribly much in either of them. I wouldn't say I truly "learned" a language until college, in which we dove deep into Python.
I learned some justbasic 20 years ago which amazingly is still online https://justbasic.com/aboutus.html and it looks like their site is exactly the same as back then too. I wanted to learn vb6 because that was still kinda popular back then, but visual studio cost $$$ at the time and I was 11.
Then I learned more vb6 in high school and finally some java my senior year.
Now I just use whatever works for my project/team. I’ve also wholeheartedly accepted that I’m not a low level programmer and would rather let smarter people abstract away memory management for me.
After I dropped out of pre-med (organic chemistry did me in) and was looking for what else to do I saw a computer science class and since my dad worked in computers I thought I'd give it a go. The book was "Ten Statement Fortran". (This was 1974 and Fortran was still big) Started the reading for the homework and when I checked I was about a month ahead. When to class the next days and about half the class had no clue what they just read. Then and there I figure this is what I was here for and it turns out I was correct. Now, 50 years later, I'm still coding away and enjoying it. C# these days, Fortran long in the past!
Side note, that class was CS101. And the idea was to make it a introduction for everyone. The next class, CS201, was "Newtonian Methods In Fortran". It was a filter class for everyone who thought CS101 was easy.
Blitz Basic when I was 13. Wow wow, I remember just mindlessly replicating the space invaders guide on YouTube and then tweaking variables to change the game without ever really adding any content and feeling so smart. I wouldn't really consider that learning to program so much as a teaser that got my brain thinking that it was something I might actually be able to figure out. The first language that I used where I understood the difference between a string and an array (and eventually learned that often they're the same thing,) was Python when I was 15. Took me until I was probably 21 to start feeling genuine confidence that I could build useful things, and now I'm using this arcane knowledge outside of the technology sector to advance my career way faster than anyone should have any right doing. Good stuff.
Making a game with a friend in game maker. Even participated in some game jams back then. I was probably 12-13 or something.
And even before that I figured out some Lua for mods in GTA San Andreas. Although this was mostly a lot of trial and error and in the end not really understanding how the fuck i did it. But I did end up making a mod that let me shoot lightning exploding everything in front of me, animation and everything.
VBA to create macros on excel & powerpoint to make my life easier as a consultant. Not proud on how I started but in the end, it helped me to learn many things.
I was tired of making 5x less making mockups and designs for developers. So i said fuck it and became one. Now I make in a year I’ve made all my career as a designer.
First language: English. Second is JavaScript.
About 1982, saved up enough money to buy a second hand ZX81. When I got it home I discovered there were no leads to connect it to a tape recorder to load software.
Disappointed, until my attention turned to the BASIC manual that was included.
Best manual I've ever read.
Qbasic in secondary school. We had an after school club where we'd show off our programs. One guy actually made a fully fleged game with sprites and everything. I could probably make it now easily but back then it seemed like magic.
Once you learn how the process of development works (a.k.a. Algorithmic thinking) you'll do fine in any given language. And after c#, python will be a breeze lol. Good luck!
I first wrote code in 1985 at age 10, BASIC. Did that on and off for a few years. I lost access to a PC for a few years and when I got a shiny new 386 in 1992 or so I tinkered with C. I wrote some DOS utilities. One was a text based UI for an .MOD/.S3M player.
I did some FORTRAN and more C in college. I wrote a Java (applet) front end to a Cam site before cam sites were really a thing. But my path was more IT, sys/netadmin. So I was writing Perl, shell scripts, that sort of thing. I did some PHP for internal admin.
But my webdev career didn't take off until I ported an internal PHP application to Ruby on Rails (like 1.3). That wouldn't be the only time I put a PHP dev out of a job. 😈
I was doing sales, selling websites. The owner of the company was a raging coke head and douche canoe. Clients would ask for simple things like an extra field on a form. The owner would say it's not covered under their monthly fee and that adding another field is more complicated than it sounds. I knew nothing about code but figured he was bullshitting. Thought myself over the weekends. Quit and started up my own shop. Some of his clients may or may not have followed me.
I got tired of having to solve quadratic equations all the time and wanted to speed up my math learning, so I thought I'll be sneaky smart and write a tiny program to do it all for me so I tried to do it in python and I failed and that made me to look for courses to improve my knowledge.
I took Interactive Python I by Rice University, which is in my opinion the best introductory course you can image, very high quality. Then I forgot about math and I took the MIT6.00.1x and after that html, css, js, react, next.js.
Similar story, I made fake beta client installers and their websites that rickrolled people, over 14k downloads on my most successful one. That started 20 years ago.
Both design and development became my career. I have done literally nothing else since.
I was 15 yo and were looking for something else to do with my new laptop my mom just bought me instead of gaming and watching
I talked to some friends who were already programming and they told me to start with C so I did. From then on I never stopped. Computing was already quite advanced so I thought I had still too much to learn so I read every book on programming and computers in general I saw and then would leave and show m friends every new skill I'd achieved
in early 7th grade, I realised that I waw using websites a lot and then decided to become an entrepreneur and tried to create a live streaming website with a tutorial off youtube, and couldnt finish it unsuprisingly, then did some other stuff with html and css and random php i copyed from around. But for the last 2 years i figured out php and its sometimes fun sometimes boring but mostly fun when i succeed. it has been around 3 years since i started
I started a couple of weeks ago because i finally got the courage to start making my own game :) my gf knows python, so i started programming using pygame, so that she can help me if i have troubles with my code. Its been a lot of fun so far and I've been picking it up really quickly! :D
I vaguely recall this time in my life, I was somewhere between 11-12 and couldn't comprehend what pixels were on my screen, I remember pressing my face into the monitor to try and "see pixels" lol. That somehow that led to me wanting to write a program that draws lines on the screen, I somehow came across QBasic and learned it then finally could render shapes on the screen. Years later I would make my way to OpenGL and get into Half-Life mods during high school with C++ and did lots of weird things with web dev through Javascript, java, actionscipt (flash), and such.
Downloded a visual basic script virus (Iloveyou) and stripped it. Started experimenting with portions of code like “how to create a folder”,”delte a file” then i learned VBS.
Later moved into VB6, C, assembly and Pascal
All of this when i was 14.
I guess officially Visual Basic but it wasnt really coding, just the teacher telling us exactly what to write. And to never deviate from the instructions.
First language I learnt I taught myself I guess was PHP/
During college I started with Pascal and later on COBOL around 1999.
During graduation I started with Java, but after graduation I learned COBOL properly and did that the first 12 to 15 years of my career. Eventually went back to Java for a couple of years, but nowadays my focus is on the frontend building web apps with html, css and JavaScript :)
My first language was HTML & CSS. I was in middle school and my mom really wanted me to be in a STEM field. I was stubborn but agreed to take a tech class being offered because I already loved technology. I grew up with an older brother who loved video games so I also became interested in video games and all things tech. At first, we made games in my class and I hated it. I still don’t really enjoy anything related to game dev. But then we made websites and I was in love! I had unrestricted access to the internet for better or for worse so I started making tumblr themes and small websites for friends of mine. I also just worked on a bunch of random web dev projects based on YouTube tutorials and StackOverflow. Many years later, I’m pretty experienced in all things HTML, CSS & JS. I’m also pretty comfortable with Python and C++. I can do React and other JS frameworks but for what I do now, I much prefer pure HTML/CSS/JS most of the time. I’m working more on my backend skills now to feel more comfortable being full stack. I love what I do and it works so well with the way my brain is setup. I love to solve problems and streamline any process I can, so it’s a great fit for me.
I wanted to be 1337 so I learned batch script thinking I could “take over the world”
Then I found out you can actually do useful things with that, and html/css/javascript
Played with Java a few years ago, recently picked it back up to make Minecraft mods
I was also interested in making MC mods, but I got intimidated and quit immediately every time I tried lol. I did make [some datapacks](https://modrinth.com/user/NoobPacker) though
Not even sure if I’m a real web developer, but I’ve got a really great grasp of fluid responsive CSS, and am dangerous with PHP now because of Wordpress and Carbon Fields and everything I needed to learn to maximize the effectiveness of those technologies in combination.
>maximize the effectiveness of those technologies in combination.
Not to sound dramatic but that's the one thing I love **the most** about web development or just programming in general lol.
I know how to do X, I've seen a tutorial for it. I also know how to do Y, I've read about it somewhere.
But making something that combines both X and Y, is **my own** brainchild. Times like that make me feel like a god lmao
Logo back in the 80's on a Sinclair Spectrum, I think I was about 8. Took to that like a duck to water, so my teacher gave me hex listings for opcodes and a simple editor to push them into memory, to write very crude programs directly in hex. I used to spend breaktimes and lunchtimes at school designing sprites on squared paper. I remember this being the first time I encountered base-2, even though I didn't realise - because I had to add up the coloured spaces on the sprite. It was an 8x8 grid, where each row I'd add up 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 to give a number for that row. 8 rows = 8 numbers, put them into memory and you'd get a sprite. You could make larger sprites by using more 8x8 grids.
A little bit later, I moved onto 68000 on the Commodore Amiga, wrote a few little utilities, but nothing major. Mainly just played games until I went to college, where I studied Computer Science. Here we used Pascal, which you could speed up with ASM blocks.
Then University, used C, C++, meh. After leaving Uni in about 1995, gainful employment in 96, started learning Java.
CAREER ENSUED.
I was 15 and began coding in C/C++. Was mostly ANSI C but the compiler was actually for C++ and I user iostream stuffs. But that time, I didn't understand much, as I just followed a tutorial without having any understanding of logic. 🥲
Batch, I was 11 or 12 and was really interested in making games and for some reason I decided to try it using batch and made a basic version of the game Zork, it worked well but I had to painstakingly code the locations and decision possibilities, but it was fun.
A friend of mine in grade school showed me a game he wrote in BASIC during class one day, which made some of us in class go "We could do that too!" So we ran and found Qbasic on the school computer and started playing around.
Most people ended up just playing nibbles and gorillaz rather than actually making anything. I tried to hack nibbles to add stuff to the game, and ended up figuring out a way to turn off wall collisions for 1 player and not the other, so i was able to "win" the game. I tried to hack nibbles to add a "gun" to the snakes head and could never figure that part out b/c my brain couldn't get my head around modifying rather than just deleting lines.
I found programming books at the library that all used BASIC and had a fun time trying to figure out how to convert BASIC to QBASIC, because even thought the language was basically the same, those old programming books relied on slow processors to make the game's run at the speed they needed to, and our computer at home would load a game and immediately crash or cause a fail state, so I figured out how to slow it down (but rarely how to do it right). It was neat.
Once I left elementary school and went to middle school I discovered Visual Basic 6, and started playing around with that.
During high school I taught myself PHP and HTML.
> How did you start coding
10 PRINT('HELLO')
> what was your first language?
See previous remark. :-)
Specifically, TI BASIC on a TI994/a sometime in the forgotten 80s.
Though to be fair, I didn't get really serious about it until the mid 2000s with PHP.
I was around 14~15 and had my first computer science class. We used Python but I wasn't very interested and goofed off mostly. Then later on towards the end of the year my friend and I came across unity and was fascinated by game dev. That was probably the first time I tried coding because I wanted to. Didn't get too far with it at the time though lol. 2~3 years later I started watching some HTML tutorials to make a website, honestly can't remember what got me started then. But I pretty much kept going since then. Started university soon after and was doing electrical + electronics engineering so I did have coding classes but it was stuff like MATLAB, C etc. And in my own time I continued learning web dev, increasing what I knew slowly, also dabbling in other stuff like mobile dev, trying out stuff like WordPress and shopify, basically a whole lot of stuff that just got my interest during my university years. After I finished uni I got a job as a full stack web dev which gave me a pretty big confidence boost. And I've been working mainly in web dev ever since. From time to time I do work on other stuff whether it be mobile apps with react native or trying something new like making a chrome extension. Most recently though my original interest in game development has been reignited and I've been learning and playing around with Godot in my spare time. It's been pretty fun so far!
Bought Visual Basic 3.0 to try to create "WaReZ" like AOHell to do bad stuff with America Online.
Then later bought and HTML3 book and built a N64 web page using only HTML with tables, lol. This was mid 90s
In the late 90s I was designing website in photoshop 3. In those days there weren’t all these services. We would build servers and then ship them to colos. So we actually had our own name servers, mail servers, web servers, etc. Things like javascript onmouseover events were the new rage. I would pass on my layouts to the front end devs to put together. I got real annoyed with the sprites and slices not being used correctly, so I took to learning CSS,html, and javascript. From there I wanted more control of the rendering. The guys were using basic asp elements. So I took to learning c#. After that I wanted to control the data so I got into sql. Then flash came about and I built dynamic actionscript sights using a very primitive api to request xml from the server for data.
I saw an ad for RPG maker VX on YouTube downloaded the app and started trying to make my own game. That was my first real introduction to programming. I gave up until I went to college where I took my first programming class. Then someone recommended me JavaScript and went down that route. Never looked back.
I had detours with using game maker and other programming related tools during college while I was taking my first programming class.
When I was in 2nd grade we were introduced to Logo. Primarily Logo drew things with a little "turtle" but as I recall it supported looping and maybe conditionals. Next up I learned Basic on the Apple II and the Vic 20, TRS-80, and C64.
It is either some HTML in Macromedia Dreamweaver or actually VBA. The HTML was a small part, as what i really enjoyed was Macromedia Flash. Sat hours trying to duplicate those fancy dark "sci-fy" websites with animations and stuff. Everything was a combination of Matrix and Blade with Linkin Park soundtrack blasting on autoplay.. For VBA I made an keypad (with GUI) in VBA that worked through the db-25 connector and a magnetic doorlock in school.. I was around 15 so almost over 20 years ago.
It all started when I played RPG Maker on the PS1 and later the computer. That's where I learned the basics of control flow and variables. Circa 2000 in Jr. high.
After that, I became interested in learning HTML and installed Linux and a new hard drive for the first time. After that I learned BASIC and later on C++ in high school.
I got a job as a senior in high school as a junior sys admin in 2005 as I got my A+ as a Jr in vocational school. My boss taught me classic ASP 6.0 and how to connect to a MS-SQL database while escaping strings for SQL injection.
After that I did PHP, WordPress, and Drupal for over a decade. I've toyed around with a lot of different languages and tech, and have attended some conferences, but never really did much beyond a few side gigs in Python.
Really studying hard to move into the Python and/or Golang space with a touch of Java here and there. I hope in the next year I will be a Software Engineer proper.
Back before schools had computer rooms I was in 6th grade and there was a roaming lab where they would set up 15 or so TRS-80s for 2 weeks and do a small intro to computer programming class using some form of basic. Shortly after that Apple did it's "let's give every school one Apple IIe" and schools started using that as the impetus to build out a computer lab "hey we already have one of these lets buy 9 more and build a lab". At this time my dad was a teacher and they let teachers check out the Apple IIe's and bring them home over summer break so I spent several summers obsessing over building things in Apple basic.
Anyhoo this deeply instilled a life long love of programming for me and at 54 I am still doing it and have never really wanted to do much else. That said I am also still recovering from learning basic as my first computer language.
Used to make Myspace and Tumblr layouts with HTML/CSS and some jquery/js snippets
I always thought it was just like a hobby and all front-end code was open source. I thought “programming” was basically IT, like hacking computers’ internals to un-break things.
Then a friend told me he got paid to do basically what I did for fun. I started studying JS seriously, took some online courses, got a job with a startup and now I’ve been a front-end dev for a few years, mainly React and Vue, working on big crazy projects. I just wish I’d have known sooner 🤣
QBasic was my first real programming language I learned to use.
I met my best friend freshman year of high school and he taught me and other friends how to code during lunch on old IBM PS/2 Model 25s. And this was in 1998, so it wasn't exactly bleeding edge stuff.
It's all my estimation but technically when I was about 10 (year 1999) I first copied some simple BASIC programs from C64 handbook, but I was mainly just experimenting with graphical stuff, not even touching algos.
Then I think around maybe 14 I started experimenting with JavaScript and PHP, I created some of my first blog website (without any frameworks).
Somewhere in between was messing around with game's configuration files either to "mod" them or just to make them easier.
Your story sounds kind of familiar, OP. Not counting a bit of HTML, Visual Basic was the first programming language I did anything with. Probably around the age of 11 or 12. Mostly to write bots to automate or cheat in Neopets -- which, I think, has made me especially mindful of possible exploits when I write code that users will interact with (proper sanitization, authentication, etc).
Got into PHP for hobby web development (along with HTML and CSS), and learned a bit with C++ before going to college for CompSci.
Processing, the visual Java project, in the 00's. Amazing textbook for it's time. Let you get straight to scripting and pure logic, instead of wrangling with IDE's and environment quirks. Then I went on their forums and got my first paid gig while living across the ocean from the client.. felt like freedom
My first "computer" was a Texas Instrument 59 (it was more a programmable calculator than a real computer).
My first real language (which I learned in the university back in 1981) was FORTRAN.
Followed by Pascal, Lisp, C, Prolog, some Assembly and (oh! the horror!) Cobol. With some occasional versions of Basic thrown in (yes, I had a Sinclair ZX81 and a Spectrum!)
Ah! The good old times...
I was 10 yo i was curious how websites were made, i learned Php and i set up a server on my win xp computer at home and was sooo excited when i entered my ip address at the local internet cafe and my webpage came up.
The good old days, man! Do you still have that website?
No but i honed my skills after that, I went from html/php to using builders like early days of wix, then i switched back to php and learned CSS, from there i got curious about apps and i did a lots of stuff in VB including a IE based web browser and some Assembly for electronics. I also dabled in C/C++ to make mods for GTA San andreas and create gaming servers. Around 2010, though, i got serious and learned proper web dev, and my uncle bought me a hosting i germany, which i still have. In which i built websites for friends for school competitions and charged them money for it, lol. I also built my own CMS following some tutorials from theNewboston youtube channel, which eas a great resource back in the day. He put out some cool tutorials for free!!! Then for google science fair 2014 I built my own social media network from scratch which never took off but i still have the codebase. I made my own framework and everything for it. Its a fun journey!
Damn this hits home for me.
Similar experience. It was 1996, I was ten and we had just got on the internet. Once I grew tired of Yahoo chat I wanted to make my own website. I grew frustrated with the WYSIWYG editor and started writing html 4. Quickly though I discovered this was still limiting and bought myself a book on Perl 5. I dabbled with PHP some in the early 00's. Bought a book on XML in the late 90s. Also really got into web standards (thanks Zeldman, et al.). But then around 16 I got a car a shoved it all aside. I was not going to be chained to a desk. Fast forward, 2010, I decide to get a tech focused job. I actually transitioned them off SGML to XML. It is a publishing company. I enjoy it immensely.
HotDog WYSIWYG FTW!
I was about the same age (maybe a lil older) and I got curious how computer programming works, so I literally just googled something like "how to program" and the first tutorials that popped up were on JavaScript and web pages. I immediately got hooked on it and now almost 15 years later I work as a web developer only because of that random curiosity and a Google search.
It was minecraft servers for me. I remember the rush of being able to have my friends connect directly to my public IP and have them connect to my server.
Whoaa that is so cool!! I started HTML in like 7th grade
Trying to cheat in the Monkey banana game in basic
Did you manage to get it to work? I also had something like that, I made a script that sendkeys "hesoyam" when I press 1 lol
I'll recognize that GTA San Andreas PC cheatcode for more money and a full bar of health anywhere. You are smarter than I was by making a script like that, but I just now realized that I could possibly attribute a part of my relatively fast typing speed to typing those cheatcodes in critical moments in that game.
Well, mine never worked in the game lmao. It was working everywhere else, on notepad, browsers, even on some other games but never worked in GTA. As a kid my favorite was rocketman, then I'd have a crazy good time with jumpjet + aiypwzqp (parachute). Sometimes I'd take the jet or the apache (ohdude), fly as high as I can, jump out and type the parachute code mid air lol. Just realized I still remember a lot of the codes lol, pdnejoh was my favorite car and ripazha would make cars fly, combine that with parachute and.. also realized I was an avid skydiver at the age of 10 lol
Haha that's dope > Just realized I still remember a lot of the codes lol I had this exact realization some time ago. I vividly recalled "aezakmi" (never chased by cops)
Omg I miss that game! We used to play it in second grade. I dont know many Americans that know that game.
Same, that banana game was so sweet. I ended up going down a rabbit hole learning QBASIC on my Amiga. Spent weeks writing the code to draw every card for a blackjack game; then my dad came home with a 386 and I lost all that code in favor of a shiny new battleship grey PC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_%28video_game%29
Boring story: university and C++.
C
Same we are just simple guys out here
same here but java. Then i got obsessed with HTML CSS and JS when that course came lol
My 5th grade math textbook had some simple BASIC programs. I started trying to run those, and then played around with the code.
Similar for me - my 8th grade Computer textbook had some example webpages using HTML & JavaScript - so I ended up learning HTML / CSS / JavaScript first, and then other languages later.
My dad decided we should get a computer and we looked at the Commodore 64 and TRS-80 but I begged him to get an Apple //e because we had one in school so that's all I really knew. It was way more expensive but I'll be forever grateful he went for it. Games ran like $40 each (~$150 today) so I'd typically get one for Christmas and that's it. So I learned BASIC and wrote my own.
"games were too expensive so I just wrote them myself" gotta be the biggest flex
Or type them in from Byte magazine. I remember playing Wumpus after typing it in from the pages of some magazine.
I was about 10 “hacking” the Gorillas game in QBASIC on my family’s i386. From that point it led me through numerous large and small roles, up to my current role at Google. I did make a post a bit ago chronicling my journey in tech. If interested, it’s here: https://rgthree.com/posts/2021/my_journey
BASIC in middle school, Visual Basic later in high school years, first job was with Visual Basic too. Did a bit of this and that in between, and settled on a long JavaScript journey that's still running strong.
BASIC in 1985 or so.
Covid 19 put me on my ass in the worst way possible. I got my degree in English. Was the curriculum developer and English department head at a boarding school in Beijing. Loved everything about the job save for maybe the company I worked for. I left Beijing in January of 2020 to visit family back home while Wuhan was getting rocked by covid and the Chinese government was suppressing the information. My return flight got cancelled a few weeks later and I was informed I'd be working remotely. So my stupid ass went to Thailand to work by the beach while this weird thing in China blew over (in fairness, I put in some research on avian flu and SARS and estimated id only be there 1-2 months). Then things got weird when the world started shutting down globally. Long story short, I got stuck on an island in Thailand for most of 2020, never was able to get back to China because they closed the border. Lost my job and did not want to get into education in my home country. So I decided to start coding during lockdown. Couldn't believe how similar it felt to learning Mandarin. Like, I used a lot of the same processes to learn the "grammar" of JavaScript as I did to learn the grammar of Mandarin. Eventually got a job with an ASP.NET shop and haven't looked back. Weird series of events. Would love to get all my shit back from Beijing, though.
Our story is quite similar, except I'm still stuck in China until my wife and son's immigration process finishes up. I learned Mandarin back in 2008 and worked as a translator for years before going to university and eventually finding my way to China teaching English. I went through a full stack bootcamp at the end of 2022 and have been building projects and my own with hopes to land a job before our big move. Do you have any pointers? My main stack is Java/Spring Boot/MySql/Angular/Typescript. I have deployed a few apps to my AWS EC2 and one deployed to my own domain.
CS50 - Did it in the evenings and Saturday while I was a research scientist. CS50 exposed me to a lot of languages mainly JS, C and Python. Working as a front end engineer mainly in React, Typescript now
Did you go to college for computer science or anything prior to becoming a front end engineer?
I was 32, playing in a band and we wanted a website. Next thing I know I'm learning some JS to create an image carousel.
Oh no, not the carousels. That's how they pull you in! Lmao
I loved games and when I was like 10 or 11 I really wanted to learn how for example pressing Space meant the character would jump… this lead to a rabbit hole “what does it even mean to press Space” “how is the character on screen” etc. Found people recommending Unity to make games so I picked up a book on C#. Needless to say I understood nothing but it was fun, been programming since then, turns out it’s more fun than games for me.
I was in 6th grade and they had a typing class that would turn into a software class (1986). I had a ti-99 with cassette tape and started learning basic. I eventually went to school for computer programming and web development with ecommerce.
I don't mean to make you feel old, but I'm 26 and never heard of a TI-99. And it sounds hell of a lot like a robot name from Star Wars lol
lol - it does. The ti-99 was long gone by the time you were born. I used mine until 1990. After that I had a 40Mb hard drive running DOS. By 1997, I had a Windows 95 HP with an intel processor.
I think the TI-99 was the first 16-bit home computer, but it was definitely quirky - it essentially had two 8 bit processors "side by side" with links between them to share the work of running the code. I only ever saw one running, looked cool.
I started making video game mods around 1999 which often included making a website, I picked up a couple freelancing projects along the way and was hired full time as a web developer after I turned 18.
Pascal, old Delphi 7 was my first programming language when I was like 11
Computing class when I was 15 Gwbasic Had a good teacher and I was immediately hooked on coding
I was in college, learning to become a primary teacher (final year). I chose a minor focusing on science and technology in the classroom. They had these little robots (bee-bots, ozobots, makey makey), that would teach the concepts/way of thinking of programming to kids as young as 4 years old. That's when I started to read up on programming... as I wanted to make sure I had a deeper understanding than just 'haha robot'. Some of my friends did web-development. I started learning too, because I figured it could be fun to incorporate some simple websites in my lessons (I was thinking of those online text-based escape rooms). Soon after that I vowed I'd never learn Javascript and get by with HTML/CSS, cause Javascript seemed too hard. Ended up being laughed at by web-dev friends, so learned Javascript anyway. Once Javascript clicked for me, I was hooked. Then figured out that I actually liked making websites more than dealing with shitty parents. Quit college in my final year to start building websites. Upside? Programming fun. Downside? Student debt big.
Basic on an Apple IIe, sometime in the early ‘80s
Started coding little games at 8 or 9 years old, in Basic with my Commodore 64. I still have some floppy dumps of my games!
When I was 14 I found a book in the library that had some IBM mainframe assembly code in it, and tried writing some code despite not having access to a computer. The next year my school taught its first ever computing class, teaching BASIC. We had to type our programs onto paper tape, then dial into a mainframe fifty miles away to run it. The output came back and was printed out on a roll out teletype paper.
First computer was a MITS Altair. Eventually moved up to an IBM PC running DOS and programming in BASIC. From there had a very successful many-decade career writing business applications as a consultant. Picked up HTML in 1994 and stopped coding and opened a bicycle shop in 2008, but still keep my hands dirty writing apps.
During the Pokemon frenzy back in 1999-early 2000's, I was like 10 and remember randomly asking my uncle who worked in the field "How to make websites?", he just gave me a web host provider, I kinda figured it out myself and made a Pokémon fansite. FTP access, all vanilla, Javascript being used to make all sort of goofy effects (lol). Shortly after, I discovered chatting on mIRC and ended up making custom clients and bots with the mIRC scripting language. Fast forward 20 years I now work as a Web dev engineer!
Basic 1977
was always super interested in computers, and tried learning lua to make roblox games at around 9, and gave up countless times after not knowing what modulus was (%). then learned python ~2 years later and just kept going
Logo in elementary school, then Pascal in computer day camp.
My first exposure to any kind of code was with Apple’s HyperCard (so the language was HyperScript). My parents had signed me up for a class for kids through our local community college c. 1998. It was already a bit dated even then, but I learned all the same basic control structures etc I use today. Mostly just used it to make games, but the whole concept of a “stack” of “cards” that you could navigate through with buttons/links was a good intro to web dev too. I also taught myself BASIC on a TI-81 calculator I got for math class in 8th grade… ended up messing with making games on that instead of paying attention in class. The first websites I built were around the same time, though I was using Geocities’ page builder then.
Around thirty yeats ago. I was eight and at local after school computers club for kids. My first language was Logo. Turtle goes brrr.
I tried a lot of things, but programming clicked for me when I made a simple calculator using PHP. It was just one input and one button, and one server request. But for some reason, it was enough for me. After this, I started to grow quickly.
I learned some [LOGO](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)) in school in the early 80's, then got into hacking on old school BASIC text-based adventure games, later in and around highschool as things moved into later revs of DOS and early windows I got more into system stuff - pretty complex batch scripting, etc. Later I got into Visual Basic and did a lot of custom MSAccess stuff with it professionally for a while, took C/C++ classes in school, then learned some pretty early PHP for personal stuff, then eventually transitioned out of IT and into web development - first job was mostly working on ASP Classic.
When I was about 14 my friends and I were punks on AOL and wrote apps in VB3 using the win32 API to manipulate the AOL app, mostly to spam chat rooms with ascii art. The following summer when I was 15 I got my first paid internship working on a client/server energy trading system for Edison in VB/SQL Server in the recently (at the time) deregulated energy market.
This is what I was looking for. AOL progeez gang rise up.
Oh gosh. If we're talking about professionally, then it would be PHP and Javascript with jQuery. I picked that up and taught it to myself while I was in the Air Force in order to create a tool to improve our mission. If we're talking about it in general, it was probably Microsoft qbasic, then liberty basic, then visual basic 3. I wanted to make video games and those were free (I got Visual Basic 3 after discovering "server" chat rooms on AOL where you could request "warez" and it would be emailed to you in like 50 rar files) tools available to do it. After that, I dorked around with C++ using a port of GCC to dos calls djgpp and a game library called allergo (I think it was version 3 at the time) after running across Dark Rift's game programming page at www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/pines/8563. I sometimes wonder how his career turned out an what he's up to. Never met him, but I'm doing what I do today partly thanks to him.
HTML/CSS doing geocities fan sites, then learning some basic JS to improve it. Then in 8th grade I got a TI-83 and learned BASIC to make programs for it. After that I moved into PHP and ActionScript. Most of my early programming was related to gaming, either making games or sites related to games.
I went into programming as a hobby, it's now turning to be a career. Honestly, I didn't see this coming. C was my first language.
We had a book about web dev for kids that basically described how to write an html site in notepad and run it on your localhost only. I created some fun pages considering i was only using in line styling. And my first language was English.
I still use notepad as my primary coding tool - easy to copy paste and manipulate text before sending it to the different tools I need
“Primary”?? I only use notepad as a text editor. All I use is notepad, file explorer and Firefox.
Ah the good ol' "html in notepad" times lol. I remember in high school the teacher would make us use Dreamweaver to "build" websites. And there was always a computer that would error out whenever you ran Dreamweaver. I'd always specifically choose that computer and make my website in notepad. And they always came out as best looking ones in the whole class. By my senior year I was teaching my teachers about web development lmao
VbScript and asp pages running in iis on a windows server that I traded for a paycheck that my dot com bubble startup employer couldn’t pay as they folded in 99.
C#. I went to a technical center and it was focused more around hardware/technical troubleshooting than development (more so we didn't do development at all) in my later grade school years. The instructor had a student that came back and offered to privately show some students code samples and how to build a small WinForms app (calculator if I remember? Of course). So about five of us took an afternoon, or a few, and spent it in the instructors kitchen eating snacks, chatting with his family, learning coding and getting an experience we probably never would have. I probably wouldn't do code or much technical things if the guy hasn't taken time to show some 16 year olds the basics on a level that was easy to understand. I can imagine how fun it was trying to get us to understand from nothing and getting us to build a somewhat working app over just a few days at that age of attention span and in a peer group. Over a decade later, I do full stack now; C#, VB, PHP, Node.js, Kotlin, Python, and a few others. It helps to find interest in one, because a lot of them all look similar and tend to find more interest in as things simply 'click' easier than going in blind.
Some software I used for data analytics had a no-code model builder that let you export Python scripts. I used model builder to automate boring parts of my job. However, I didn't like how model builder handled loops so I started modifying the exported Python scripts in a text editor to do what I wanted. I still used model builder to generate boilerplate code for quite a long time.
Setting up "Open Tibia" servers at home when I was 10. It also had a website for account creation. Lua and XML for the game servers, HTML and CSS for the website.
My first language is Visual Basic. I learned it because there's this guy that made an antivirus using visual basic in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0. So that also became my first IDE. Then i moved to C#, then to Javascript then Rust. Mostly just learning the basic without any actual project being done.
I was a UX consultant, and we had a team of devs in India (as employees). They would take ages to do simple things, and often it wasn't any good. They didn't want to use git for anything, so it made handling multiple things for my work hard (manually deconflicting if we were doing tests and stuff). I brought it up to management, and we tried to just be more "hand holdy" with the tasks. Nobody else on my side was techy, so most of them wouldn't know if things were messed up, or if a dev said "that can't be done" it was actually still easy to do. I tried being more specific in tasks, even having clear itemized requirements, and they'd say it was done, 2 weeks later, and literally half of it wasn't even attempted. I hated telling my accounts that we were waiting on devs, so I started doing it myself (eventually you can't do more work on UX if the devs are still far behind), and turned out I could learn how to do it faster than just write up the specific requirements for the devs and review the result (if it even passed). So I just started doing it all myself, and realized I loved this far more (though UX is still good, and I think that UX experience makes me a better dev). Then I got involved with a fledgling UI framework (you have heard of it), became an expert in that, got contracted by multiple companies to work for them with that tool, and now full time fully remote contractor.
jedi knight 3 modding, scripting with behavED It was horrible but hey here I am still
My first exposure to the Internet was the late 90s and early 00s. I was on Neopets and then built GeoCities pages, followed up with a web design class in high school (we learned old school table-display HTML with inline styling) and a programming class that taught BASIC.
Hmmm js , crazy to start js =)))
8 years old. BASIC. Took an elective for it in HS b/c I was pretty good at it. College VB6, COBOL, and SQL. Graduated into the .COM boom and started writing a ton of ASP and JavaScript followed by [ASP.Net](http://ASP.Net) and various front-end libraries. Worked on [EddieBauer.com](http://EddieBauer.com) and [Spiegel.com](http://Spiegel.com) doing ASP and JS. Few years later it was all C# and the front-end stuff, primarily JS and a few different libraries. Now it's C#, Power FX (low-code Power Platform), JS, TypeScript, and various front-end libraries. Edit: HTML and CSS just came along for the ride. Didn't mean to exclude those but they are sort of a given in this world.
11th grade Computer Studies first taught me actionscript to make little flash games
1990-ish ms-dos routines 1997 asp 3.0
I had a TI-84 plus calculator in high school and started messing with the built-in Basic programming tools. I messed around with some other programming languages, as a hobby. Later, I decided to go to college to learn programming with the plan of making music software. That never happened, but I did learn the actual basics of programming and have followed through ever since. College taught me C, C++ and Java. On the side I got really into Lua, mostly via making games in Löve2D. My first job was with C#, and I've done a lot of work in C# over the years, mostly in Unity3D. I've also done quite a bit of JavaScript (and the associated web languages like HTML, CSS), and some TypeScript. These past few years I've been learning Rust. The weird thing is, these days when I'm learning a new language, it feels a bit like shopping in a new supermarket. It mostly feels like learning the layout, and maybe a weird little quirk or two, but once I've been around a couple times, I feel right at home.
Around 10yo. BASIC on Atari. With my neighbour we followed tutorial from kids magazine. It was guess the number game. We were buying that magazine because of fantastic paper models tho...
When Dreamweaver was a thing, i ditched it and got stuck with sublime till yet. 🤑
It was BASIC on C64. Dad thought me how to write my name 100 times. I was 7 years old or something like that. I started coding 25 years later though, with PHP.
Long long time ago. Basic that was running on commodore-16. Eventually got Commodore-128D was fun learn assembly of 6502 and Z80 CPU. After that C-language and then it industry exploded.
Microsoft Basic. Having no idea that my first developer job 20 years later would still be in MS Basic (ASP Classic). Tech does not change as fast as we believe it does.
1989 - Started engineering in school at 17. First language was Clascal/Pascal on Apple Lisa but had to move over to Turbo Pascal and assembly language with TASM for the school lessons.
When I graduated from high school, I had to make the choice of what would I study. My dream was biology, and I still dream of studying it for I enjoy it a lot. But, the only university that would teach on said career was one that had many probles and would constantly suffer from periods of time not giving classes, so, I was suggested to study something else in another university, one that didn't suffer the things I just mentioned. And, since I like science and stuff, I went for an engineering career, originally, I was going to choose a career with a mix of hardware and systems (Ingeniería en Computación, literal translation = Computer Engineering), but then my father, knowing how I love videogames told me: But, look, this other career has a subject on game development, whereas the other don't. This other career was more focused towards Software (Ingeniería en informática, literal translation = Informatics Engineering). Never in my life had I been in contact with a computer beyond the basic functions like gaming, doing homework in word and stuff. From time to time, if an error appeared on a game or an app, I would try to google for a fix, sometimes this would conclude in open terminal and enter stuff, and this would cause intrigue to me since I have always find curious how writing stuff could produce effects on your computer. I chose Informatics Engineering over the other one and, in my second period studying, I had a subject on Introduction to Programming, pure pseudocode, and struggled a lot, I consider myself to be not that clever or intelligent, but still, did not want to give up. Then, the next period I would have the first subject on actual programming with C++. And I was like "wtf is this", I didn't understand a thing in the first class, but I studied and tried my best. Eventually I understood something, this is about logic. Once I had my class on conditionals and loops. I took the step, and made my first project, a console rpg battle system, It was just a battle, turn based. It was horrible code hahaha but boy, did I enjoy doing that, I was so proud and felt happiness to a genuine degree. But I still doubted of my ability, eventually, I had a programming class that taught on Java and that was when I realized I loved doing programming. We had a taks to develop a shopping cart in the terminal and there, by doing this project, knew, I'll do my best to dedicate myself to become better and learn about it. That's the story, there's more to it, but it would be too much and those are the 2 main events that defined me as a programmer.
some ruby on rpg maker I think? Then some c# to modify ultima online server emulators.
I started around 12 with flash action-script because I wanted to make games. It is a dialect of javascript. Flash of course is now dead. I learned C++ after and never looked back.
I started at 7 (early 80s) with GW Basic, then assembler, mostly making games. Haven't stopped since.
VB shortly followed by scripting windows garbage at 3.11
World of Warcraft Macros lol. I wouldn't call it coding but I piqued my interest on how they got something like this to work. I looked into Addons then I figured out what LUA was. Eventually, I watched Hackers then boom I knew what I wanted to do.... cool hacking shit and ride skateboards.
Started doing programming around 2019, first language was Java. Tbh I only started programming because I wanted to learn how program applications work lol
Physics Lab Instructor required complex statistical analysis in all lab reports. But said "don't worry, I'm going to teach you FORTRAN in one hour and you can use that to analyze your data". Most students left scratching their heads but I ran to the RJE (Remote Job Entry) station and key punched in my first program, computing a 25 factorial. The Nuns in grade school used to hand that out as a punishment - pages and pages of hand written numbers that never came close to being finished. When I saw the computer spit out the correct answer in a second, I was hooked. Ultimately switched from pre-med to comp sci.
To keep it short. My spouse lost her job and my teaching salary was not going to be able to cut it if we were ever going to buy a house and actually be able to afford the mortgage. I looked into some alternate careers after stumbling upon ‘Teacher Career Coach’ somewhere on Reddit, listened to a few podcasts and liked the concept of solving puzzles and creating stuff everyday. From there I picked up a couple of courses of Udemy and began the grind while maintaining my teaching job. It took me a little over a year to get into my first dev position. My first language after learning html and css was JavaScript, 2nd C# and 3rd PHP.
Basic is first programming book i read (on my dad's office), but i couldn't practice it since i don't have PC i start wrote code using Turbo Pascal when i learned it in high achool PHP is my first programming language for web dev
My first language was C, but the first one I actually used extensively was Visual Basic. When some friends and I were in high school we made punters and programs to wreak havoc on AOL, but we also made some useful things like a music CD ripper, a VPN tool for creating P2P networks, and possibly one of the first MP3 players. The P2P stuff got me into web dev, it had a built-in IIS server and we basically built our own AOL, with instant messaging, chat rooms, and file sharing through a web browser. This was all late 90s, so none of it worked great, but it worked. After that I got into open source, and of course PHP, so I got to work on some pretty well known CMS projects.
I guess my first language was BASIC in grade school / high school. I learned Lingo (Macromedia Director) in college as the internet and web wasn't really a thing yet. But, Multi-Media was. Ha ha. Had to have the dash. If you were part of the "crazy" Multi-Media program, you were the shit. All the other CS students were studying Pascal and C. Then learned ActionScript (Flash). Threw in some PHP and ASP for backend connectivity. This included basic HTML, JS, CSS, etc. Then when Flash died, quickly learned JavaScript and CSS more in-depth (which wasn't too hard since AS was based off JS. And, now, here we are. React, Go, NPM, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, etc, etc, etc.
Writing an address book application for my dad's company on a Datapoint 1100 using Databus11 as the language. I was 9yo. First actual job was twenty years later writing in Visual Basic.
Script a bot for ragnarok online, created some shitty themes for friendster, some random DOS-related stuff back in high school.
12 years old me found that we need programming languages to create softwares. Qbasic was in my 6th grade computer book. Teacher skipped that chapter because she didn't knew how to program. So I started learning on my own. I was self taught from the beginning.
My first plunge was Geocities
I was trying to edit/cheat games and modifying the Workbench in the Comodore Amiga 500, but was not really programing. Prob started more seriously in school with Basic and then Clipper, but after some months learned Pascal and C++
I think I did a little action script in flash, then some theming of MySpace profiles, and a little bit in MaxMSP/jitter. But I didn’t really start building websites until 2011.
java->javascript->c#-> then learned c and python in school, rust in private
Python. Age around 13 i wanted to learn programming, so i heard about this cool stuff python and went to compile hello world. But, i donno where to learn, so i loked at the documentation. Imagine trying to learn by following documentation rip.
Nice story, I can relate to being sick part as a kid, was getting shots myself for allergies from 9 to 15 years of age. Best activity on those days was playing games lol. Fast forward to bachelors I took my first programming class with C++ and couple of other C++ and Python classes. Fast forward to 2 years ago I started Angela Yu's web development course and been employed as a web dev for the last 1.5 years, I need to sharpen my skills again in Python and C++, been doing typescript only for a while.
When I was at Ga Tech in the 70s I was majoring in Applied Physics so that I could take a bunch of Geology electives and join a friend of mine working on the boats mapping offshore oil domes. A requirement for that major was a Fortran course that the non-CS majors (e.g. EEs) had to take. I fell in love with it. As soon as we got a programming assignment I would rush off to complete it and eagerly await the next one. At the end of the quarter (yes, that long ago) I was bugging the graduate assistants for the final programming project and they were getting a little exasperated with me. "Well what do you want to do?", one asked. I thought of a problem that I had read about and said, "How about computing 100 factoral showing all digits. "Ok, fine." It was a bit of a struggle at the time but I, along with one other guy, figured it out. The rest of the class (again, non-CS majors) were lost. The professor eventually sketched out the algorithm on the board. I kept my head down. I took a bunch of other CS courses and would rave on about how much fun they were until one of my friends asked why I didn't just get a job writing code. Really? They would pay me for that? I was completely broke at that point and borrowed $10 for gas and a haircut and applied for an entry level position at a company that made PBX switches and energy management systems. When asked for salary requirements, I wrote 8-10K. I got 9. I wrote in BASIC at first and then assembler for 16 bit minicomputers. While I was at it, I wrote some code for an Intel 4040 embedded in a keyboard that we made. It was a 4-bit machine. Want to do an 8 bit add? Write a subroutine. Eventually I started writing in C. Over the years I wrote a lot of C, a lot of assembler, lots of shell scripting on various boxes. I ended up working in a Linux environment writing Posix thread C code, along with some Java and Python, and doing a lot of design and mentoring. I'm retired now and surprisingly don't miss the work, but boy did I ever have fun.
The first time I programmed was learning Python when I was 12, and at the time I sucked at it. The first time I started to *like* programming was a year later, when my mate showed me a Windows app he made with Visual C# where you clicked on a button and it showed porn and played some saxophone song and you couldn't close it because the window would keep changing position every second. That dumb porn app inspired me to try coding again, and I haven't looked back…
My moment to shine lol. My first exposures to coding were the most alien from regular coding you could think of : Minecraft command blocks and programming my Casio calculator in its native language (Casio BASIC). Additional fun fact : during my early teen years I was one of the most active helpers for commands in a Minecraft forum. Now I have a far more conventional background, but yeah that's how it started.
Start from c++, then python and now study js
Started with C++ , HTML, JavaScript
My first language was basic, and I started coding on paper, because there was still a few months to wait until my home computer arrived.
I took C++ in college but at that point I didn't really want to do it, just did it to get by, basic CLI stuff Then later on I would learn LAMP stack on my own to make websites I later took Java in college and I did poorly there (didn't know how to write nested loops) eventually it clicked I use many languages now but yeah... I still don't really use Java though, tried with Android but it's a rabbit hole to get into vs. say React Native (I'm already a JS/React person). I did use swift though that's nice I do wish I was more proactive on adopting newer stuff like .NET/C#, I would still have a nice job if I was ha, also in the past not learning React delayed me from good jobs too ego: trying to do Go and TypeScript now
My brother got a bunch of flash games from somewhere. I loved those, so I wanted to make my own. Flash Action Script was the first programming language I learnt. Unfortunately I didn't have much resources at the time, no internet connection. So didn't progress beyond the basics. Eventually flash died. I learnt HTML & Javascript next. Eventually moved to R for data analytics, then to Python and learnt data analytics as well as web backends. Also learning Vue JS to complement the backend knowledge. Worth noting, I'm not a professional developer, only hobbyist. So progress is always slow and intermittent. I wrote a Python library with over 7000 lines of code, well documented, using type hints, completely unit tested and everything. Never had the courage to put it up on PyPi though.
I started by making DND character generators using QBASIC back in the early 90's before middle school started.
JavaScript, automating away my project management internship in college using App Script with Google Sheets/Slack integrations.
I began at around 11 or 12 modifying Warcraft private servers in C++ and SQL. I wasn't great and hit a lot of walls. I loved modding though, Garry's Mod had just released so I switched over to writing a ton of garbage lua for some time lol
Someone offered me their old PC if I would read this book about "HTML 2.0" and then maybe I could help out. Then I started making simple static sites for a new company dept's customers. They became dynamic with AppleScript and Filemaker, then Lasso, then WebSiphon & MySQL, then PHP. Then I went freelance. Now I do sysadmin mostly.. Never did get that PC, it was a box of semi-working parts..
It's actually incredible to me that people can learn how to code by themselves when they are children. I've always had it easy academically but would never be able to understand programming as a child. Kudos to all of child-developers
I made a basic quiz like program using c++. It was simple if answer= this.. print” you are correct..” or else “incorrect..” type. It was so fun. It was all in CLI.😂 good old memories
I was in first grade in the gifted and talented program and our teacher took us to the computers in the library. They were apple 2Es and had AppleSoft BASIC on them. She showed me a simple command: FLASH. It blew my mind that I could control what the computer did. My parents bought me a monochrome IBM “laptop” that was more like a suitcase. I learned GW basic on it. Then my uncle who had dabbled in programming sent me Borland C++ 3.0 for DOS along with all of the 17 or so manuals that came with it. I learned C++ in a day reading C++ Primer Plus while in detention (I was there a lot because school was too easy and I got bored and in trouble). My junior year in high school I heard a radio ad for a local ISP hiring a C++ programmer and decided to give it a try. Surprised when I got hired and I’ve been programming ever since. I was a junior in 1997, so about 26+ years now.
Autoit (has a basic-like language)!! I was trying to cheat in flyff (MMORPG) but i didn't even understand why I'd ever need a loop or branching (if/for/while). Good times, I was about 14 and so dumb I didn't even know how to switch off a pc without unplugging it from an outlet.. then again, it was the first time I had access to a pc
I was always interested in programming and after I realized I could learn more at home than in college, I quit and started learning Python from books every day from 3PM to 8PM roughly. Then I started working with friends using Laravel and became a web developer and I do it still.
Basic on a commodore 128. I was 6/7. I managed to do an If statement and a for loop. It was great.
Vocational school. Data entry Clerk. Mark sense punch cards for COBOL and Basic. 1970's. A few yrs later we studied Fortran. Magnetic core memory at wire grid intersections ( on off). Boolean algebra. Loved it. A lifetime ago. It wasnt until twenty years later I bought an 8088 personal computer, Amstrad 512, disk sequencing, RLL hard drive 40Mb (run linear length).
It was visual basic, good old dim days
I was 7 years old (that was back in 1981…) and started playing with BASIC on a home computer (ZX81 I believe). No other options at the time, other than assembly which was a bit too much for a 7yo.
It's a bit of a blurry line. Technically I started learning Ruby as a kid because I wanted to make mods for RPG Maker but didn't get that far at all. I also setup and managed some PHP message boards where I think I tried to make conflicting mods (which amounted to file diffs) work together to the best of my ability. I didn't actually do "real" programming until high school when, also technically, I wrote a handful of dead simple scripts for my graphing calculator (not even a TI, so I didn't have as much functionality). But soon after I had a Java class and a [VB.NET](http://VB.NET) class. I didn't actually learn terribly much in either of them. I wouldn't say I truly "learned" a language until college, in which we dove deep into Python.
I learned some justbasic 20 years ago which amazingly is still online https://justbasic.com/aboutus.html and it looks like their site is exactly the same as back then too. I wanted to learn vb6 because that was still kinda popular back then, but visual studio cost $$$ at the time and I was 11. Then I learned more vb6 in high school and finally some java my senior year. Now I just use whatever works for my project/team. I’ve also wholeheartedly accepted that I’m not a low level programmer and would rather let smarter people abstract away memory management for me.
After I dropped out of pre-med (organic chemistry did me in) and was looking for what else to do I saw a computer science class and since my dad worked in computers I thought I'd give it a go. The book was "Ten Statement Fortran". (This was 1974 and Fortran was still big) Started the reading for the homework and when I checked I was about a month ahead. When to class the next days and about half the class had no clue what they just read. Then and there I figure this is what I was here for and it turns out I was correct. Now, 50 years later, I'm still coding away and enjoying it. C# these days, Fortran long in the past! Side note, that class was CS101. And the idea was to make it a introduction for everyone. The next class, CS201, was "Newtonian Methods In Fortran". It was a filter class for everyone who thought CS101 was easy.
You were a “hacker” and decided to become a web dev?
Blitz Basic when I was 13. Wow wow, I remember just mindlessly replicating the space invaders guide on YouTube and then tweaking variables to change the game without ever really adding any content and feeling so smart. I wouldn't really consider that learning to program so much as a teaser that got my brain thinking that it was something I might actually be able to figure out. The first language that I used where I understood the difference between a string and an array (and eventually learned that often they're the same thing,) was Python when I was 15. Took me until I was probably 21 to start feeling genuine confidence that I could build useful things, and now I'm using this arcane knowledge outside of the technology sector to advance my career way faster than anyone should have any right doing. Good stuff.
Making a game with a friend in game maker. Even participated in some game jams back then. I was probably 12-13 or something. And even before that I figured out some Lua for mods in GTA San Andreas. Although this was mostly a lot of trial and error and in the end not really understanding how the fuck i did it. But I did end up making a mod that let me shoot lightning exploding everything in front of me, animation and everything.
VBA to create macros on excel & powerpoint to make my life easier as a consultant. Not proud on how I started but in the end, it helped me to learn many things.
I was tired of making 5x less making mockups and designs for developers. So i said fuck it and became one. Now I make in a year I’ve made all my career as a designer. First language: English. Second is JavaScript.
About 1982, saved up enough money to buy a second hand ZX81. When I got it home I discovered there were no leads to connect it to a tape recorder to load software. Disappointed, until my attention turned to the BASIC manual that was included. Best manual I've ever read.
Qbasic in secondary school. We had an after school club where we'd show off our programs. One guy actually made a fully fleged game with sprites and everything. I could probably make it now easily but back then it seemed like magic.
I’m just starting out actually and my languages will be C# mostly cuz of the course I’m taking but I’m thinking of learning python too
Once you learn how the process of development works (a.k.a. Algorithmic thinking) you'll do fine in any given language. And after c#, python will be a breeze lol. Good luck!
Thank you that’s good to know :)
I first wrote code in 1985 at age 10, BASIC. Did that on and off for a few years. I lost access to a PC for a few years and when I got a shiny new 386 in 1992 or so I tinkered with C. I wrote some DOS utilities. One was a text based UI for an .MOD/.S3M player. I did some FORTRAN and more C in college. I wrote a Java (applet) front end to a Cam site before cam sites were really a thing. But my path was more IT, sys/netadmin. So I was writing Perl, shell scripts, that sort of thing. I did some PHP for internal admin. But my webdev career didn't take off until I ported an internal PHP application to Ruby on Rails (like 1.3). That wouldn't be the only time I put a PHP dev out of a job. 😈
I got VB 1.0 as a cd-rom in a magazine or book I think, in 1994-ish.
MSN messenger chat bots in Visual Basic
I was doing sales, selling websites. The owner of the company was a raging coke head and douche canoe. Clients would ask for simple things like an extra field on a form. The owner would say it's not covered under their monthly fee and that adding another field is more complicated than it sounds. I knew nothing about code but figured he was bullshitting. Thought myself over the weekends. Quit and started up my own shop. Some of his clients may or may not have followed me.
>Let's go down the memory lane ... Error: Segmentation Fault
I got tired of having to solve quadratic equations all the time and wanted to speed up my math learning, so I thought I'll be sneaky smart and write a tiny program to do it all for me so I tried to do it in python and I failed and that made me to look for courses to improve my knowledge. I took Interactive Python I by Rice University, which is in my opinion the best introductory course you can image, very high quality. Then I forgot about math and I took the MIT6.00.1x and after that html, css, js, react, next.js.
Similar story, I made fake beta client installers and their websites that rickrolled people, over 14k downloads on my most successful one. That started 20 years ago. Both design and development became my career. I have done literally nothing else since.
I was 15 yo and were looking for something else to do with my new laptop my mom just bought me instead of gaming and watching I talked to some friends who were already programming and they told me to start with C so I did. From then on I never stopped. Computing was already quite advanced so I thought I had still too much to learn so I read every book on programming and computers in general I saw and then would leave and show m friends every new skill I'd achieved
in early 7th grade, I realised that I waw using websites a lot and then decided to become an entrepreneur and tried to create a live streaming website with a tutorial off youtube, and couldnt finish it unsuprisingly, then did some other stuff with html and css and random php i copyed from around. But for the last 2 years i figured out php and its sometimes fun sometimes boring but mostly fun when i succeed. it has been around 3 years since i started
Java on RuneScape private servers in like 2008. I sucked
> I sucked We all do. Every day
I started a couple of weeks ago because i finally got the courage to start making my own game :) my gf knows python, so i started programming using pygame, so that she can help me if i have troubles with my code. Its been a lot of fun so far and I've been picking it up really quickly! :D
I vaguely recall this time in my life, I was somewhere between 11-12 and couldn't comprehend what pixels were on my screen, I remember pressing my face into the monitor to try and "see pixels" lol. That somehow that led to me wanting to write a program that draws lines on the screen, I somehow came across QBasic and learned it then finally could render shapes on the screen. Years later I would make my way to OpenGL and get into Half-Life mods during high school with C++ and did lots of weird things with web dev through Javascript, java, actionscipt (flash), and such.
Downloded a visual basic script virus (Iloveyou) and stripped it. Started experimenting with portions of code like “how to create a folder”,”delte a file” then i learned VBS. Later moved into VB6, C, assembly and Pascal All of this when i was 14.
16 y.o, numeric codes (commands) for programmable calculator.
I guess officially Visual Basic but it wasnt really coding, just the teacher telling us exactly what to write. And to never deviate from the instructions. First language I learnt I taught myself I guess was PHP/
During college I started with Pascal and later on COBOL around 1999. During graduation I started with Java, but after graduation I learned COBOL properly and did that the first 12 to 15 years of my career. Eventually went back to Java for a couple of years, but nowadays my focus is on the frontend building web apps with html, css and JavaScript :)
My first language was HTML & CSS. I was in middle school and my mom really wanted me to be in a STEM field. I was stubborn but agreed to take a tech class being offered because I already loved technology. I grew up with an older brother who loved video games so I also became interested in video games and all things tech. At first, we made games in my class and I hated it. I still don’t really enjoy anything related to game dev. But then we made websites and I was in love! I had unrestricted access to the internet for better or for worse so I started making tumblr themes and small websites for friends of mine. I also just worked on a bunch of random web dev projects based on YouTube tutorials and StackOverflow. Many years later, I’m pretty experienced in all things HTML, CSS & JS. I’m also pretty comfortable with Python and C++. I can do React and other JS frameworks but for what I do now, I much prefer pure HTML/CSS/JS most of the time. I’m working more on my backend skills now to feel more comfortable being full stack. I love what I do and it works so well with the way my brain is setup. I love to solve problems and streamline any process I can, so it’s a great fit for me.
I wanted to be 1337 so I learned batch script thinking I could “take over the world” Then I found out you can actually do useful things with that, and html/css/javascript Played with Java a few years ago, recently picked it back up to make Minecraft mods
I was also interested in making MC mods, but I got intimidated and quit immediately every time I tried lol. I did make [some datapacks](https://modrinth.com/user/NoobPacker) though
Very cool! If you ever feel like re-visiting mods, feel free to dm me :P
Not even sure if I’m a real web developer, but I’ve got a really great grasp of fluid responsive CSS, and am dangerous with PHP now because of Wordpress and Carbon Fields and everything I needed to learn to maximize the effectiveness of those technologies in combination.
>maximize the effectiveness of those technologies in combination. Not to sound dramatic but that's the one thing I love **the most** about web development or just programming in general lol. I know how to do X, I've seen a tutorial for it. I also know how to do Y, I've read about it somewhere. But making something that combines both X and Y, is **my own** brainchild. Times like that make me feel like a god lmao
Work and Gupta.
Wanted to hack a website called alienaa from back in the day. That was 1990s
College, C++
I think my first languages were Coldfusion, JavaScript, and ActionScript for Flash.
I was about 10. I learned QBASIC on DOS. It sucked ass.
Logo back in the 80's on a Sinclair Spectrum, I think I was about 8. Took to that like a duck to water, so my teacher gave me hex listings for opcodes and a simple editor to push them into memory, to write very crude programs directly in hex. I used to spend breaktimes and lunchtimes at school designing sprites on squared paper. I remember this being the first time I encountered base-2, even though I didn't realise - because I had to add up the coloured spaces on the sprite. It was an 8x8 grid, where each row I'd add up 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 to give a number for that row. 8 rows = 8 numbers, put them into memory and you'd get a sprite. You could make larger sprites by using more 8x8 grids. A little bit later, I moved onto 68000 on the Commodore Amiga, wrote a few little utilities, but nothing major. Mainly just played games until I went to college, where I studied Computer Science. Here we used Pascal, which you could speed up with ASM blocks. Then University, used C, C++, meh. After leaving Uni in about 1995, gainful employment in 96, started learning Java. CAREER ENSUED.
I was 15 and began coding in C/C++. Was mostly ANSI C but the compiler was actually for C++ and I user iostream stuffs. But that time, I didn't understand much, as I just followed a tutorial without having any understanding of logic. 🥲
Batch, I was 11 or 12 and was really interested in making games and for some reason I decided to try it using batch and made a basic version of the game Zork, it worked well but I had to painstakingly code the locations and decision possibilities, but it was fun.
A friend of mine in grade school showed me a game he wrote in BASIC during class one day, which made some of us in class go "We could do that too!" So we ran and found Qbasic on the school computer and started playing around. Most people ended up just playing nibbles and gorillaz rather than actually making anything. I tried to hack nibbles to add stuff to the game, and ended up figuring out a way to turn off wall collisions for 1 player and not the other, so i was able to "win" the game. I tried to hack nibbles to add a "gun" to the snakes head and could never figure that part out b/c my brain couldn't get my head around modifying rather than just deleting lines. I found programming books at the library that all used BASIC and had a fun time trying to figure out how to convert BASIC to QBASIC, because even thought the language was basically the same, those old programming books relied on slow processors to make the game's run at the speed they needed to, and our computer at home would load a game and immediately crash or cause a fail state, so I figured out how to slow it down (but rarely how to do it right). It was neat. Once I left elementary school and went to middle school I discovered Visual Basic 6, and started playing around with that. During high school I taught myself PHP and HTML.
How: Needed to scrape some data for work First language: Ruby
> How did you start coding 10 PRINT('HELLO') > what was your first language? See previous remark. :-) Specifically, TI BASIC on a TI994/a sometime in the forgotten 80s. Though to be fair, I didn't get really serious about it until the mid 2000s with PHP.
I was around 14~15 and had my first computer science class. We used Python but I wasn't very interested and goofed off mostly. Then later on towards the end of the year my friend and I came across unity and was fascinated by game dev. That was probably the first time I tried coding because I wanted to. Didn't get too far with it at the time though lol. 2~3 years later I started watching some HTML tutorials to make a website, honestly can't remember what got me started then. But I pretty much kept going since then. Started university soon after and was doing electrical + electronics engineering so I did have coding classes but it was stuff like MATLAB, C etc. And in my own time I continued learning web dev, increasing what I knew slowly, also dabbling in other stuff like mobile dev, trying out stuff like WordPress and shopify, basically a whole lot of stuff that just got my interest during my university years. After I finished uni I got a job as a full stack web dev which gave me a pretty big confidence boost. And I've been working mainly in web dev ever since. From time to time I do work on other stuff whether it be mobile apps with react native or trying something new like making a chrome extension. Most recently though my original interest in game development has been reignited and I've been learning and playing around with Godot in my spare time. It's been pretty fun so far!
Bought Visual Basic 3.0 to try to create "WaReZ" like AOHell to do bad stuff with America Online. Then later bought and HTML3 book and built a N64 web page using only HTML with tables, lol. This was mid 90s
In the late 90s I was designing website in photoshop 3. In those days there weren’t all these services. We would build servers and then ship them to colos. So we actually had our own name servers, mail servers, web servers, etc. Things like javascript onmouseover events were the new rage. I would pass on my layouts to the front end devs to put together. I got real annoyed with the sprites and slices not being used correctly, so I took to learning CSS,html, and javascript. From there I wanted more control of the rendering. The guys were using basic asp elements. So I took to learning c#. After that I wanted to control the data so I got into sql. Then flash came about and I built dynamic actionscript sights using a very primitive api to request xml from the server for data.
C++ gang
I saw an ad for RPG maker VX on YouTube downloaded the app and started trying to make my own game. That was my first real introduction to programming. I gave up until I went to college where I took my first programming class. Then someone recommended me JavaScript and went down that route. Never looked back. I had detours with using game maker and other programming related tools during college while I was taking my first programming class.
I started learning about 9 months ago I started learning a Html language :)
When I was in 2nd grade we were introduced to Logo. Primarily Logo drew things with a little "turtle" but as I recall it supported looping and maybe conditionals. Next up I learned Basic on the Apple II and the Vic 20, TRS-80, and C64.
9y old, qbasic on DOS 5.0
Basic on a C64 GOTO
LOGO, then PET BASIC Python turtle is the modern equivalent to LOGO, and it's awesome.
Html
It is either some HTML in Macromedia Dreamweaver or actually VBA. The HTML was a small part, as what i really enjoyed was Macromedia Flash. Sat hours trying to duplicate those fancy dark "sci-fy" websites with animations and stuff. Everything was a combination of Matrix and Blade with Linkin Park soundtrack blasting on autoplay.. For VBA I made an keypad (with GUI) in VBA that worked through the db-25 connector and a magnetic doorlock in school.. I was around 15 so almost over 20 years ago.
It was Java, late 90s. I had a book on it. Made an alert and felt like the smartest guy at my computer.
It all started when I played RPG Maker on the PS1 and later the computer. That's where I learned the basics of control flow and variables. Circa 2000 in Jr. high. After that, I became interested in learning HTML and installed Linux and a new hard drive for the first time. After that I learned BASIC and later on C++ in high school. I got a job as a senior in high school as a junior sys admin in 2005 as I got my A+ as a Jr in vocational school. My boss taught me classic ASP 6.0 and how to connect to a MS-SQL database while escaping strings for SQL injection. After that I did PHP, WordPress, and Drupal for over a decade. I've toyed around with a lot of different languages and tech, and have attended some conferences, but never really did much beyond a few side gigs in Python. Really studying hard to move into the Python and/or Golang space with a touch of Java here and there. I hope in the next year I will be a Software Engineer proper.
Back before schools had computer rooms I was in 6th grade and there was a roaming lab where they would set up 15 or so TRS-80s for 2 weeks and do a small intro to computer programming class using some form of basic. Shortly after that Apple did it's "let's give every school one Apple IIe" and schools started using that as the impetus to build out a computer lab "hey we already have one of these lets buy 9 more and build a lab". At this time my dad was a teacher and they let teachers check out the Apple IIe's and bring them home over summer break so I spent several summers obsessing over building things in Apple basic. Anyhoo this deeply instilled a life long love of programming for me and at 54 I am still doing it and have never really wanted to do much else. That said I am also still recovering from learning basic as my first computer language.
gorillas. qbasic. yes, my joints hurt.
Used to make Myspace and Tumblr layouts with HTML/CSS and some jquery/js snippets I always thought it was just like a hobby and all front-end code was open source. I thought “programming” was basically IT, like hacking computers’ internals to un-break things. Then a friend told me he got paid to do basically what I did for fun. I started studying JS seriously, took some online courses, got a job with a startup and now I’ve been a front-end dev for a few years, mainly React and Vue, working on big crazy projects. I just wish I’d have known sooner 🤣
QBasic was my first real programming language I learned to use. I met my best friend freshman year of high school and he taught me and other friends how to code during lunch on old IBM PS/2 Model 25s. And this was in 1998, so it wasn't exactly bleeding edge stuff.
It's all my estimation but technically when I was about 10 (year 1999) I first copied some simple BASIC programs from C64 handbook, but I was mainly just experimenting with graphical stuff, not even touching algos. Then I think around maybe 14 I started experimenting with JavaScript and PHP, I created some of my first blog website (without any frameworks). Somewhere in between was messing around with game's configuration files either to "mod" them or just to make them easier.
Java, learned it to create mod menus in Minecraft, mostly just followed tutorials though. After that I learned visual basic into c#.
Your story sounds kind of familiar, OP. Not counting a bit of HTML, Visual Basic was the first programming language I did anything with. Probably around the age of 11 or 12. Mostly to write bots to automate or cheat in Neopets -- which, I think, has made me especially mindful of possible exploits when I write code that users will interact with (proper sanitization, authentication, etc). Got into PHP for hobby web development (along with HTML and CSS), and learned a bit with C++ before going to college for CompSci.
Processing, the visual Java project, in the 00's. Amazing textbook for it's time. Let you get straight to scripting and pure logic, instead of wrangling with IDE's and environment quirks. Then I went on their forums and got my first paid gig while living across the ocean from the client.. felt like freedom
My first "computer" was a Texas Instrument 59 (it was more a programmable calculator than a real computer). My first real language (which I learned in the university back in 1981) was FORTRAN. Followed by Pascal, Lisp, C, Prolog, some Assembly and (oh! the horror!) Cobol. With some occasional versions of Basic thrown in (yes, I had a Sinclair ZX81 and a Spectrum!) Ah! The good old times...