I tried to write a game. The game wasn’t fun, but programming kept mashing the “I created something” reward button in my head, so I kept doing it.

The fact that debug cycles are fast. I started out working in nanotechnology, and spending 3-4 days of fabrication -> electron microscope -> optical verification was soul crushing cause 99.9% of the work never led to anything and you practically never knew why.

Software development is logical and predictable. It’s (relatively) easy to break a large task down into small ones, prove to yourself that they will work, and compose them together to complete a large project. Sure, things go wrong here and there, but for the most part, you can be confident that whatever you’re doing should work every step of the way… without having to worry that you committed some irrecoverable error at any step in the process.

The worst teacher I ever had assigned me a project to make a game using GameMaker. Been hooked ever since, and eventually turned it into a career.

I wanted to make videogames. I made videogames on my graphing calculator between classes.

Working through the logic is fun

I loved (and still do) the rush of solving the puzzle. Programming languages give you a constrained set of rules to express yourself with. And yet we know that you can create literally anything with those rules if you can just put them together in the right way.

I love when a program actually comes together and it works for the first time! When I’ve started from nothing but a vague desire and then pulled a solution from out of the void. It’s as close to actual magic as anything else I can think of.

I compel lightning and stone to my will, commanding them in unspoken tongues.

Thought it was the best way to meet hot guys

Beats doing tedious shit by hand and knowing you’re gonna fuck it up.

When I started with computers, the cheapest way to get software was to buy a computer magazine which published software as printed source code. Yes, you had to type page after page from that listing to get a game or utility running. On top of that, I had NO means of saving such a program - it took some time until I could afford the cable to attach a cassette recorder as a storage device.

So I got quite good at two skills early on: Typing fast - and debugging. I basically learned debugging code before I really knew how to program.

And how did I get into coding? I remember the first attempt of understanding code was to find out: “How do I get more than three lives in this game?”

And from there it went to re-creating the games I’ve seen on the coin-swallowing machine at the mall that I could not afford to play, but liked to watch.

Since then, I’ve done about everything, from industrial controlles for elevators to AI, from compilers to operating systems, text processor, database systems (before there was SQL), ERPs, and now I do embedded systems and FPGAs.

I’ve probably forgotten more programming languages than todays newbies can list…

Seeing my dad show my mom a demo he’d written in assembly on the C-64.

I saw a lot of software and in my stubbornness I thought “that’s awfully designed, I can do better than this.”

I liked computers in general since highschool, felt natural.

Didn’t think that much about the money there or now and IT is slowly becoming bluecolar anyway.

When I first got daily access to internet (back in 2009), I got curious about how programs are built. Like, if I wanted to make my own application, what should I do?

I googled something along that direction and it linked me to a famous french website for learning programming (site du zéro) where I learnt C language.

After the course I made a 2D Snake game with SDL2. How naive was I to think I could write it in one go without testing anything in between! I scrapped the 1st attempt because it was a disaster and randomly inserting/removing * was not helping.

I started again from scratch, testing in smaller steps, and I really liked it. After a couple of weeks I had my Snake game working! I was so proud of it that I showed it to my mom. I do not have the source files anymore but I still have the binary somewhere

Afterwards I sticked with it and continued programming - I was back in school without much access to internet so I programmed on my TI-83+ instead. Eventually I pursued computer science studies then a PhD… It got me hooked real good.

My father, as a sysadmin with some coding knowledge, got me my first PC, some old tower with a GT 210. I was probably ~5 yo. After moving to a new house (for the fifth time), I got another PC, I think. This one was even older, but with Ubuntu Server it ran perfectly. My father taught me the basics, so cd, mv, nano and init, as we set up a minecraft server together.
A few christmases after that I got a new PC, the old one was promoted to a server and the old server was sorted out (in retrospect, keeping the floppy drive in there would’ve been kinda cool). Then a Pi was welcomed into the room, yet another server, as the old/new one broke, came too, this time it was a HP Mini Tower thingy. A Raspberry pi zero w for testing and stuff got here too.
But since I got the first server, I learned bash, ofc. Through Minecraft I got to Java, vanilla gets pretty boring after some time. Some time after, I decided to switch to Linux fully (I only dual booted Kali (and before someone starts to scream: I actually needed it)), as Windows kept getting buggier and shittier, I chose Pop as a daily driver. This screamed for custom scripting, so Python came to mind. At the same time I was interested in C# and learned it on my phone, because why not.
One or one and a half years ago I got sucked into depression even deeper, so I switched to my love, always, Arch. Going along was the desire to learn something even nerdier, so C/C++. I’m confident to say that I’m good in python, and OK in C#, so why not. Now I even program things sending and parsing web requests in C++, because speed.

TL;DR:
Strong personal interest since I was 10 through Minecraft (Java), Linux (Python), random other languages (C#, Ruby) and speedy languages (C/C++).

Now I see classmates, 18 years old, and of generation TikTok aka. “I press that button and there are pictures now” trying to learn programming. Fine, I guess, but they lack the most basic skill of all: Acquiring knowledge. Every answer needs to be prepared for them, everything else is inquired from ChatGPT.

My middle school algebra teacher sparked my interest in coding.

Due to moving around a lot, I never learned any mathematics, not even basic arithmetic before middle school. In the seventh grade, I was put in a class where the teacher just handed out worksheets with arithmetic problems, and then usually left the classroom until the end of the hour. On the rare occasions when she stayed, I asked her to teach me arithmetic, but she didn’t believe I couldn’t do it, so she never taught me and I failed the class.

But in the eighth or ninth grade, they allowed me to sign up for the Algebra for dummies class, which taught in two semesters what the normal class taught in one. My new teacher taught me arithmetic the first day, and I was his star pupil from that point.

He invited me and some other students to stay after school to learn FORTRAN. We did not have a computer at the middle school–it was at the university. We didn’t even have a card punching machine. So we had cards that looked like punch cards, but instead of punching holes in them, we coded the Hollerith code in them by filling bubbles with a number 2 pencil. Then we sent the cards on a mail truck to the university and got back a printout a week later.