In 2001 I was in the 3rd grade and neopets.com was the website everyone spent time on in the computer lab. I wanted to learn how to build a website and with some googling learned about Apache, PHP and MySQL. Shortly after I was trying to figure out why performance was bad. This is when I learned about the request-response loop, background task queues etc. I kind of grew out of PHP (it was missing some of the concepts found in other mature languages) and switched to Java. Looking back I’m happy to see PHP has matured as a language and ecosystem.
Ask HN: What motivated you to learn to code at a young age?
11–20 of 29 posts
Re: Ask HN: What motivated you to learn to code at a young age?
#12[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What motivated you to learn to code at a young age?
#13Cliche and boring, but video games.
My first foray into anything tangentially related to programming. Was figuring what the cryptic text files left on my desktop by RuneScape were (JVM stack dumps)
The next few years I really wanted to learn to make games. Interestingly, I never made any games, not really learned the programming languages I set out to, but I did learn the basics of programming, along with a ton of topical knowledge that has managed to be useless, but fun for talking about.
Re: Ask HN: What motivated you to learn to code at a young age?
#14I dabbled a little before, but I often wonder if I am ruined forever by picking up Beginning Perl at 12 because it was the only programming book I could find at my local library.
I wanted to know more about my computer. Learning to program seemed like the next step. I'm a sysadmin now. Knowing the basics of how programs are written really comes in handy when they misbehave.
Re: Ask HN: What motivated you to learn to code at a young age?
#15I wanted to create video games.
Re: Ask HN: What motivated you to learn to code at a young age?
#16When I was 12 it was Counter Strike & World of Warcraft.
Nobody knew how to install weapon skins, sprays, or custom maps, so I learned how to do that & taught people in my clan how.
Nobody knew how to organize 40 player raids, so I learned how to host a forum & build a guild website for recruiting new players.
Eventually, I learned the power of automation and setting up bots to do the repetitive tasks on WoW like grinding honor and mining ore to make a little bit of money to pay for the subscriptions & computer parts.
It got to a point where I could level & gear a character up while I was at school and then do the fun PvP (player vs. player) arenas to get a special "Gladiator" title & sell the account on ebay for a pretty penny because it gave people a faster mount. Good times.
Re: Ask HN: What motivated you to learn to code at a young age?
#17I bought a copy of SimAnt and caught my sisters playing it. I didn't think it was fair that I had paid for it but they were playing for free so one of my dad's friends showed me how to rename the main executable and put a .bat file in that would check that the first argument matched an expected value (to "password protect" it)
Re: Ask HN: What motivated you to learn to code at a young age?
#18I wanted to make more complicated Bukkit plugins for a Minecraft server I administered. Thus began a dive into Java, then Javascript, Python, Elixir, and now Solidity.
Re: Ask HN: What motivated you to learn to code at a young age?
#19I wanted to rip books from my high school's online book service so I could read them offline. I was 15 when I started programming in JavaScript, decided I didn't like it, and moved over to Python.
Re: Ask HN: What motivated you to learn to code at a young age?
#20Some people on Animal Cross for the Nintendo DS were able to mod their towns like crazy, then some people had cheats and kept them to themselves, I was determined to figure out how they did it.