Ask HN: How did you get from learning to code to making your first dollar?

Just simple jobs that would take someone at full speed less then a day to finish. And then I'd say that I'd deliver in 5 - 7 days so I knew I could bang my head against something silly for a night without getting into trouble with timely delivery. I was always on the lookout for stuff that would make me learn something new yet at the same time I knew I could nail so to keep my feedback very positive.

Never looked at the hourly wage as it's more a bit of beer money to learn something that you also would've learned for free. Under promise, over deliver.

Best feeling was one client that was so happy with my work and needed something done fast (I was a bit further in the game then and very comfortable with my estimation of the work that needed doing and me being able to do it) that he hired me for 1,5 weeks and paid $4200,-. Felt like a sort of rite of passage. Especially since he was really happy with the work and thought it was worth every penny :)

Good thing about sites like Freelancer.com is that although the money is shitty you learn a lot about dealing with customers without tainting your local market. I add nothing from Freelancer to my portfolio I use locally and I don't add anything from my local portfolio to my Freelancer one as I don't want anyone to connect the dots and try to get me cheapass.

Getting the first job is very hard without any reputation and reviews on the site but it gets surprisingly easy once you have a couple happy customers who've said nice things about you.

-I taught myself.

-I learned to program while in a non-programming role, so I wasn't making programmer money at the time, but I was paid.

-It took me about six months to move into a programming role.

-Web developer at a small agency.

Long answer:

When I got out of the Army in 2009, I was hoping to get into something networking related, preferably security. I didn't have any experience in the area, but I had always had a knack for computers. However, after nine months of job hunting, I was ready to take anything remotely computer related and ended up accepting a position as a customer service rep/QA tester at a small (4-6 employees) web development agency.

My boss gave me a lot of freedom, so when I wasn't tied up with customer support or testing I worked on speeding up processes that were extremely tedious and/or time consuming. This agency had been around for more than a decade at this point, so there were a lot of things we did a certain way just because "that's how we've always done it." For example, at the end of each month we would review the hours logged against various client projects and create invoices manually. This process generally took several days because we would print out hard copies of all the time entries and mark up the sheets with pens and highlighters, then transfer that back to Word documents to be printed and sent to the client. By writing a little code and moving to an Excel spreadsheet for reviewing the logged hours, I was able to cut the time down from several days to "just" 3-4 hours. It was like magic!

I continued doing this kind of work in my free time until one of our developers left for another company. I expressed interest in moving to a development position and got the job. At this point, I had been with the company for about six months. I honed my skills for a while and got involved with some OSS communities and started a blog, both of which served to really help me grow as a developer. About a year and a half after moving into the development position, I moved on to the company I'm with now. I'm still doing web development, but not at an agency - I work primarily on internal tools and processes for a company.

That site was never really finished, as by the time I hit high school, almost everyone was using Facebook, and my idea seemed redundant. However, through high school, I kept up on a number of side projects (mostly in Python, and Django where appropriate), and also participated in Google's Code-In (a great experience for a high school student who'd never contributed to anything with more than a few users, so far. Would definitely recommend to anyone at that age interested in CS). That was my first "paycheck", but it hardly counts, as it was only ~$200, made from an organized competition. One of my side projects was a Chrome app that I sold for $5 each, and I made a couple hundred dollars off of that, too.

I got my first real job (part-time) when I moved to the Bay Area to go to college studying CS. Conveniently, a startup just off of the campus was looking for a Python/Django dev, and the skills I'd acquired on my own doing side projects were enough that I could dive into a moderately large codebase with a good idea of what was going on (and this was before I'd even started classes). I'm still with that startup now.

So, the timeline went something like this: ~2007: taught myself basic programming. 2009-2010: made some money in Google Code-In and selling an app. 2013: went to college, got employed at a startup.

I took a high school course in BASIC in '81 or '82, and am self taught beyond that point. Similar story for electronics. I did those things for fun while pursuing a mainstream math / science major in college.

At that time, at least in my region of the country, CS was almost exclusively data processing on mainframes. If you wanted to get into anything else, like scientific programming or microprocessors, you could do so just by being crazy enough to volunteer for a task. Many people bought their own computers and brought them to work, to bypass the computer bureaucracy.

A friend of mine was an electronics tech in a factory. They bought some sort of computerized test gadget. The boss asked if anybody wanted to learn how to program it. My friend was the only guy who stepped forward. I think he was interested in seeing if he could use it to run his model railroad. It launched a new career for him.

During college and grad school, I used any computer at hand for any task that I could come up with during summer internships or research projects. I found kindred spirits among the professors, who were doing the same sorts of things.

Many of those people were also ham radio enthusiasts, and it was a similar mind-set.

My experience didn't lead to a programming gig per se, but my programming skill has probably helped my career greatly over the years. I've done things such as designing computer controlled factory machines, modeling, prototyping, embedded gadgets, etc., but have not written "production" code.

I had a business degree and was working in an oldschool industry. The programming school guaranteed a job offer, I received 3 job offers. I started working one week after finishing school. I work as a ruby/node/frontend developer.

the program was called gschool(http://gschool.it). it was ran by Jeff Casimir of Jumpstartlab and Turing School (http://Turing.io)