Ask HN: When did you 1st start programming and why? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: When did you 1st start programming and why?

#21

Post by eswat » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 2:45 PM UTC

Started when I was about 16, making mutators for Unreal Tournament 2003 using its scripting language. I was doing HTML before this but this was my first foray into logical programs. One of my mutators was an honourable mention in Epic’s Make Something Unreal Contest at the time.

I’m more of a designer than developer now but I still appreciate what I’ve learned during that time, makes it easier to communicate ideas with hackers easier.

Re: Ask HN: When did you 1st start programming and why?

#22

Post by cosmicray » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 2:54 PM UTC

Started out in a college in the early 70's as an EE major. Fortran was a required course. Decided I like it so much better, that I switched majors. Spent a summer hacking the OS internals on the college mainframe to make it more efficient. Learned 360 BAL in the process.

What I carry in my pocket (an ipod touch) is orders of magnitude more powerful than that mainframe was.

Re: Ask HN: When did you 1st start programming and why?

#23

Post by guynamedloren » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 4:30 PM UTC

I was in the same boat as you about 6 months ago with no programming experience whatsoever (21 yrs old and a semester away from graduating college). I had trouble learning RoR, but stuck with it and launched the mvp of my first web app last week. I wrote a brief summary of my experience learning rails and building the app already (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2112146) so I won't repost for the sake of redundancy, but there's the link. Feel free to shoot me an email if you need any tips with Ruby on Rails from a new programmer prospective.

Re: Ask HN: When did you 1st start programming and why?

#24

Post by guynamedloren » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 4:31 PM UTC

smashing wrote: post #15

When I was 31 years old and laid off for 6 months, I decided to take matters in my own hands, learn ObjC and start programming. I started selling products two months later through the iOS app store. Now I make enough to pay my bills, my customers are happy (Note: I don't do contact work), and my revenue is increasing. Advice: Just because you're not a "rockstar" or haven't been doing it since you were twelve doesn't…

Care to share what you're working on?

Re: Ask HN: When did you 1st start programming and why?

#25

Post by smashing » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 3:22 AM UTC

guynamedloren wrote: post #24

smashing wrote: post #15

When I was 31 years old and laid off for 6 months, I decided to take matters in my own hands, learn ObjC and start programming. I started selling products two months later through the iOS app store. Now I make enough to pay my bills, my customers are happy (Note: I don't do contact work), and my revenue is increasing. Advice: Just because you're not a "rockstar" or haven't been doing it since you were twelve doesn't…

Care to share what you're working on?

Without getting into any specifics, I am one of the many, many crumb-snatching, niche-players in the App store. All I can say is, thank God the high selling apps in the marketplace get so much attention because if developers just did a bit of research and built products focused on traditional market segmentation (and combined that with good seasonal macroeconomic policies) then I would have ALOT more competition where I am.

Re: Ask HN: When did you 1st start programming and why?

#26

Post by robflynn » Tue, Jan 25, 2011, 7:38 AM UTC

I began programming in 1992 when I was around 12 years old. The reason was that my desire to play video games some how managed to clash with the fact that, as a kid, I had no money.

I grabbed a copy of turbo pascal 3.0 and began figuring out how to program.

I ended up creating a silly little DOS text game that involved trying to make a smiley ascii character collect diamond ascii characters. If I recall, you had to avoid the ever-so-dangerous asterisk bad guys.