Ask HN: How did you learn coding

I spent about five years working as a graphic designer (both parents were designers with home offices that they encouraged me to use as a teenager) before I realized it was a relatively difficult and unappreciated profession considering the average salary. At the time (I was about 24, 2004-ish) I was working closely with a team of java developers and I knew I was capable of doing what they did, so I just eavesdropped on all of their technical conversation and looked up the terms I couldn't understand. I had to do some flash work as part of my job, so I picked up some actionscript, read a bunch of materials on OOP freely available from Sun Microsystems at the time (not very high quality compared to what is available today). I stopped drinking, stopped going out on the town, and started coming home every day after work and reading everything I could find on actionscript and javascript, and building portfolio apps. I kept telling everyone I worked with that I was learning programming and eventually someone referred me to a small design agency that was looking for a junior developer. They ended up growing fairly rapidly with a lot of clients in the Seattle startup community, and that exposed me to the network that I still get my work from today. My first year there was hellish and I often had to sleep under my desk as I tried to keep up with client deadlines while learning on the job, but I eventually gained some proficiency and the rest is history. It has been my life's passion ever since, and I shudder to think how my life would have turned out if I hadn't taken that leap. I hope that I can have children and teach them everything I know about computers some day.

Edit: I probably wouldn't have been exposed to half of the stuff I now know if it weren't for HN, which I consider one of the treasures of the internet.

BASIC and library books. Age 12.

Started screwing around with a limited version of Visual Basic 6 when I was 8 or 9. I had always liked the visual design of computer programs, so the programming was sort of a means to an end to make cool GUIs.

This limited Visual Basic had most of the features of the professional edition, except you couldn't distribute compiled programs (only run them in the editor), and they took out all the help files for some reason. I got pretty used to having to forage on my own to find decent documentation for anything, relying on computer manuals from local libraries and tutorials from random sites to fill in the blanks. I'm not really sure why I had the patience to put up with that, to be honest. I think I just assumed everyone learned programming like that. I pretty much never met another person who knew anything about computer programming face-to-face until I went to college.

When I got tired of not being able to compile anything, I ended up experimenting with Visual Basic.net in a beta of Visual Studio 2005 a relative gave me, had a bad experience with that, and started looking for alternatives. Eventually, I basically settled on Python.

I still think Visual Basic 6 is one of the best programming environments ever made. It started in seconds, the GUI designer just worked, and the autocomplete was perfect. It even opened up with a blank project you could start screwing around with without even saving anything, encouraging a lot of experimentation with the widgets and language. It was QBasic for a different generation. :(

Ahhh... the IBM PS/2 - probably one of my favourite ever computers to use. I had a Model 50 and a model 70 for years.

First coded on my Dad's Commodore 64 when I was maybe 9-10, and never stopped programming/building software (now 33). I guarantee I was the only one in my school district who received a copy of Visual C++ 4.0 for Christmas the year it came out. Kept at it through middle/high school, then a 4yr BS in CS. 10 years later and it's still my favorite thing to do.