Ask HN: How did you learn coding

I started coding because I like to make useful things. I took vocational electronics in high school, and I REALLY liked digital circuit design, so my teacher recommended I take a programming class. Programming was taught in turbo pascal on machines that had no hard drives, only large floppy disks ('94).

I picked it up very quickly, and made my mom (a teacher herself) a grading program she could use to manage student's grades, wrote a couple of screensavers, all in turbo pascal.

I then delved into C++, and started learning unix, and learned to write system utilities and scripts as well as basic sysadmin stuff.

I took some time off of school to work as a touring musician, but when I went back to college (as a CS major), I needed a job, so I got a job at Glaxo Wellcome because I was a capable sysadmin who could manage the DEC boxes they used for development, and I could also code. I did a bunch of things for them in C, then perl, then finally java after it was out.

I'm coming up on 20 years of working as a professional programmer, and I still love to code as much as I did back in high school. I've had various executive roles over the past 8 years, but I've never moved away from coding. It's one of the great joys of my life.

First was BASIC built into a Soviet ZX Spectrum clone. Then, a bunch of years later, i tried pirated copy of Borland Delphi 4, since it was all mostly drag and drop. Some years after I got free clan page hosting from planetunreal.ru (I was playing a lot of UT at the time), which offered PHP/MySQL combo.

I started in the late '70s when I built a processor technology sol-20 from tubes of ICs, a circuit board, and parts for a case. The damn thing didn't work when I powered it up. I was crushed. I took it in to the Milwaukee Computer Store and the tech guy (I wish I could remember his name) pointed out that one of the EEPROM pins had bent underneath the chip. He straightened it and boom! I learned to program the Intel 8080 based Sol from the "intel 8080 Microcomputer System's User's Manual", September 1975.

In what must have been an early example of software piracy, I dumped a hex dump of my University's Intel development system's macro assembler and typed it in by hand. I hand edited the code in hex to use the Sol's cassette tape drive instead of the paper tape, Cool stuff: Load assembler from tape, load assembler sourec from tape, rewind, load again for pass two.

UCSD Pascal came out around that time, but it required more than the Sol's available 48K of memory. I disassembled the Sol's monitor and moved it from 0xc000 up to 0xf800 (I think) and, Hey Presto! I had a Pascal development environment. I think I wrote one or two Pascal programs before I met... C.

I first used Small C on the 8080 and then decided I needed a processor with better addressing modes. I switched to the 6809, wrote the Introl-C compiler, and almost lived happily ever after. :-)

1996 - age 14. I had just gotten a computer at home I could use. I took computer science class in summer school (extra credit. Summers without school suck). Watcom basic. A year and a half later my professor gave up and gave me the wbasic manual so I could play with non ascii which he did not understand. I was 99% sure I would be working in pure math before then. I always loved solving problems or puzzles. Computers seemed to give me more options. Played with Linux/BeOS/Visual Basic. (And a very little java/Delphi). Got my BsC, now I lead a team of 5+ and work in any language/framework I want.