My father had a an old HP Vectra 286. Somehow I found the 5.25 floppies with QBasic 4.5 and the manuals and just started experimenting with it. I must have been around 11-12 years old. When I was 14 and doing work experience in system administrator I got a Free sad CD. That started my Unix journey.
Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
21–30 of 89 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#22When I was 11 years old my parents bought a 48k ZX Spectrum for the family. These were huge in the UK, and to a lesser extent they were popular in Spain too.
The tape-recorder which was used to load programs from cassette-tape did not work, so my sisters ignored the machine and I started reading the manual, which had instructions and an introduction to BASIC.
Got hooked on BASIC, then z80 assembly, later graduated to working in intel assembly and similar low-level stuff.
These days I'm sysadmin/devops/cloud/whatever pointless title and while I program for fun, and to do terraform, etc, I'm not a coder per se.
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#23On the 6502, which a relative gifted me when I was around 9. The cool part was that they also gifted me a huge stack of boxes with C64 magazines in them that contained new games and programs the publishers found cool and wrote about. Then you could type in the code of those games and play or modify them, as a lot of them were commented codes. The amazing part was the reader comment section in the end, where people we…
Similar story here. C64 was amazing, even to load a game, you had to learn some commands. (Unless the game was in a cartridge.)
Then I got a PC, and learned structured programming with Borland Pascal and later Turbo C. These were great IDEs for the time.
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#24Started by reading lots of articles on Topcoder (they have a dynamic programming tutorial which imo is the best material on DP). Then did exercises from CLRS before writing a single line of code. I considered it leg work and not of very high value (remains true though, the best paying jobs in tech are research and in finance its quant trading). Then I dived head first into C++ and Java, slogged through the pain and I got absolutely hooked. I learnt almost all of the computer science I know through books, good old fashioned working through exercises, doing lectures on MIT Ocw. Never paid a single cent for any professional courses or bootcamps or any of that jazz. I did write some Python in high school but most of the work I did while at uni studying something else entirely. My initial objective was not to build anything at all but to just get better at competitive coding. But then I built something reasonably complicated and I have been an engineer ever since. I have worked in ML, distributed systems, low level systems programming in the past 10years. To answer the question I learnt coding by self study.
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#25Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel, and then The C Book by Mike Banahan, Declan Brady and Mark Doran. No clue why those books in that order, but they both proved to be decent choices.
Then I had a couple of jobs where I was given access to data and opportunities to go beyond my expected duties by doing things with that data, i.e. automation and reporting.
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#26My father was a software engineer (working on satellite control systems ... very cool stuff) and he bought a ZX Spectrum in the mid 80s when I was about 8. That gave me access to Basic and I picked up the fundamentals from there. I didn't love it until university and using the Internet for the first time though. There's something about writing code that people can access from anywhere in the world that I find really exciting.
Considering I've spent 40 years coding things I really should be better at it.
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#27I think the very first code I wrote was in QBasic, but the first _real_ code I wrote was in Visual Basic 6. I drew a row of dice and then a bunch of buttons and wrote a Yahtzee game (single player). It took me weeks and it was mostly a giant nested if statement. Good times.
Same order for me. Also DOS batch files if they count.
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#28I was probably about 12-13 when I started learning how to code. I liked video games, and I wanted to have a creative outlet. I started building games with C# and the XNA framework. Eventually, I turned it into a career. (Doing webdev, I've never done professional game development)
That was probably about 20 years ago, I'm 32 years old now.
Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#29On the 6502, which a relative gifted me when I was around 9. The cool part was that they also gifted me a huge stack of boxes with C64 magazines in them that contained new games and programs the publishers found cool and wrote about. Then you could type in the code of those games and play or modify them, as a lot of them were commented codes. The amazing part was the reader comment section in the end, where people we…
Similar story here. C64 was amazing, even to load a game, you had to learn some commands. (Unless the game was in a cartridge.) Then I got a PC, and learned structured programming with Borland Pascal and later Turbo C. These were great IDEs for the time.
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Re: Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
#30There used to be a website called Planet SourceCode where everyone uploaded their own code. I would download the zip files from there and build clone programs by watching how everyone else did it. Mostly programs for Windows XP, Visual Basic and Delphi clones.