Personally, I started off with Roblox back in the early 2010s, and taught myself Lua. I really liked those Tycoon games, and wanted to see how they worked.
I eventually found Minecraft (like every kid back in the day did), and learnt Java to make Bukkit server mods.
Around 2016 I thought websites were kinda cool, so I started learning HTML, CSS, and JS, and I’ve been in the web dev space ever since.
What about the rest of y’all? What’s your personal programming path?
TI-83 graphing calculator in high school, around 1998. I would sit there in math class coding games in Basic. Ended up developing a reputation as the guy you went to if you needed a program to cheat on a math test.
The highlight of the entire endeavor was a class wherein the teacher announced that before a test, they’d be resetting the memory on everyone’s graphing calculators, to prevent cheating. I wasn’t planning to cheat, but I did have a few games I was working on, and I didn’t want to lose them, so I wrote a program that emulated the graphing calculator’s interface, and would let you go through all of the steps to reset the memory, including showing the Programs menu as being empty afterwards, while not actually resetting anything.
I showed this to the teacher just before the test (demonstrated “resetting the memory” with the program running, then demonstrated that the memory was in fact not reset), and he backed off from the compulsory reset policy in favor of the honor system, because he conceded that he wouldn’t be able to verify that the memory was actually reset anyway. Made me feel like an absolute hero.
It’s honestly funny because I learned the concepts in the math classes a lot better as a result of this - it took a very thorough understanding of how to use a concept to write a program to solve it for you.
It’s honestly funny because I learned the concepts in the math classes a lot better as a result of this - it took a very thorough understanding of how to use a concept to write a program to solve it for you.
My experience almost exactly. I built the interest by making/hacking TI-83 games, then made math class programs which i never really used because i had learned the material. It was fun, eye opening, and paved a path to my career!
Growing up in the 90s, I watched my father work with computers in the US Air Force. In 2001 he gave my brothers and I an HTML book and stated that “With this and Notepad you can write your own websites”. We proceeded to tear that book apart and each of us had a web site on our Windows 98 SE computers that were networked together and thus had our sites linked together. Nothing spectacular but it was fun.
I wish now that I had spent more time on the javascript side of the book as I am still pretty weak with JS.
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It’s a silly reason for my case. When I was like 11, I watched so many hacker movies and was like “damn this is cool, I want to be like them” so I dug through the path of “how to become a hacker” and saw that I need to know the program before trying to hack it. Tried learning C but failed because my monkey brain can’t handle all that. So I ended up writing random bash and python scripts since that time.
Back then, when you wanted some new games you could:
- buy them (over expensive)
- trade some on cassette tapes at the schoolyard
- Go to the library, grab some source code books, have fun programming them
Wrote my own text-adventure when I was 10, since then I came across Basic, Turbo Pascal, JS, Java, AS, Lua, Python, C++, maybe some more 😵💫
Took a random programming fundamentals course in college. The rest is the rest
TI-83 in high school. I made a “fishing” game where you would pick two numbers, and the calculator would do the same, and wait a random amount of time. If you picked the same numbers as the calculator it would tell you what kind of fish you caught. It had a bunch of overrides and a really rudimentary save state.
From there I taught myself python, bash, sql, and c++. I installed linux on my computer and taught myself the LAMP stack and basic server administration. All in high school.
You’d think I had a successful career as a programmer with such a promising start, but no. My dad was (and still is) convinced that jesus is coming back “any day now” and was sure to tell me how fucking stupid my aspirations were. I eventually landed a job as a programmer, but decades later than i should have.
Copied basic code out of computer magazines, read a DOS 3.1 book cover to cover in the 80s as a kid. Just always drawn to it. Today I wrote some bicep code to allow my dev team to access the key vault in the lower environments but not the upper. I’ve done Vb6, flash actionscript, objective c, Java, C#, python, C++, SQL, ruby, spingboot, jquery, angular, react, Perl, PHP, VBA, Foxpro, T-SQL, and many other languages.
It’s still fun.
I started when I was 7 on an old Amstrad CPC464, together with a book teaching you BASIC. I mainly copy/pasted programs from the book until I learned some basics. It’s been programmer’s life ever since.
What a trajectory your life can take from one simple child’s enjoyment.
I started a WoW guild in 2007, and installed a basic phpbb forum. But that was too generic for my liking, and I had a grand vision of setting ourselves apart via an awesome website built off the back of the forum login system.
What was I going to do? Pay an expert to do a proper job? With my money?
So that’s how I got into PHP, and HTML /CSS, and everything since has just spiraled from there.
And yes, one of the first guild applications we got through my swanky new system failed because of an apostrophe. But this is how we learn!
My stepfather Michael. I owe it to him.
He did drafting and design. One day ion the nineteen eighty’s at work, someone gave him a TRS-80. He let me use it. It came with the obligatory box of unlabeled disks and several copies of ‘digital’ magazine. Among the disks was one labelled ‘edtasm’ in blue pen. It was the editor program for writing in assembly. I bought books on assembly (mail order through a local bookshop) and tried to create the ‘pong’ game. It was terrible. So much frustration.
When my stepdad saw that, he bought me an Atari 65XE home computer, which had an editor for writing in basic and had a port for saving the data off to a cassette tape so you could reload later. That was a fun time in my life and a good skill to learn early on. It made me unfearful of learning programming, which might have helped me more. I would go on to learn VB, C, C#, Autolisp and VBA.
Today, I’m a refractory designer, and my pet project at home is loading 3D CADD models into Unity where I play it like a video game, manipulatiing them in VR. At the moment it’s mostly taking a hammer to it, but when my stress goes back down and I get back to it, it shows real promise.
Minecraft plugins, a very fun way to learn Java
