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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m a little old.

I liked video games as a very young child. Naturally I wanted to make my own.

We didn’t have the Internet because this was the early 90s, and my parents didn’t think it was worth the hassle.

The computer we had did have BASIC on it , and it had some help files. I think I got a book from the library, too, but I was too young to really do well with books written for adults. I made some progress making some games, mostly text adventure style, but they were incomplete and messy like you’d expect from a kid. A kid with no Internet to look things up on, too.

High school had some programming classes. They were pretty okay.

Then in college I hit the trope where the smart kid who never had to study finally hits difficult material and doesn’t know what to do. Woops.

I was a curious child, and things spiralled out of control from there…

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…

Working through the logic is fun

I loved math, so a friend of my mother said I could make the computer do maths for me.

6 years later and I’m still amazed computers do what I tell them. And now that I work with this everyday, I’m even more amazed anything works at all.

It wasn’t the money, it was the ostracizing. I was bullied mercilessly for years and my only retreat was the inside. Computers were the most entertaining thing, so spending a lot of time on it, made me good at it.

Nobody knows what I sound like, smell like, look like, etc. online. I could delete this account right now and pop up with a new one - to anybody but the admins, it’d be like a new person showed up. Also: I can leave whenever I like.

Semi-related: opensource is great too. If something doesn’t work, I can try and fix it. If the maintainer(s) doesn’t want it/can’t integrate it, a new fork can be created (soft or hard).

Finally, it’s cheap. No need to buy expensive equipment, materials, space, pay teachers, or have a team.

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 studied chemical engineering in university, but I realized it wasn’t what I hoped.

What I hoped: sitting at a desk, drawing schematics, crunching numbers, designing chemical plants, coming up with smart ideas, etc.

What it actually was: walking around a chemical plant or factory and managing plant operators (they knew way more than I did).

It turns out programming is exactly what I hoped from chemical engineering. I love solving problems from the comfort of a desk.

Math was always my favorite subject in school, and it seems programming is a type of applied maths.

my mum bought me a vic-20. it was beat up and didn’t have a tape deck.

I had type my games in from a magazine in basic for a summer, I was hooked.

My uncle gave me a photocopy of a book about assembly for c64 and showed me intros on his c128. He had no idea about programming, he just figured I’d be into it. I worked my heart out to get the cash together for a c64 AND a disk drive.

Interesting that it looks like everyone has come from computers. I got into it because of electronics and robotics. To me controlling stuff in the physical world seemed really cool and it still does. I went straight in with assembly language for microcontrollers.