Ask HN: HN people who write meaningful software, how did you learn to program?

I learned to program because I needed to get things done.

First I wrote a tool to check a bunch of coupon codes on a website, then I taught myself to code to hack a friend who tried to hack me. Eventually it turned into writing tools to hack websites and then it turned into making them. Then it turned into entrepreneurship, contracting and now bootstrapping small projects which collectively make a good amount of money.

The key skill to effect change in the world (and reap the benefits) is not programming, it's learning to think in terms of product and use software as a way to deliver value.

My dad was a mechanical engineer. One of my first memories is playing Hunt the Wumpus on a SYM-1 with him. Later, we had a Commodore VIC-20, Commodore 64, etc. I taught myself BASIC. It was really cool to be able to create so easily. Just turn the computer on, and start typing.

Then I got a job writing BASIC around the time I was in high school, and by the time I went to college, I was lucky, knew what I wanted to do, and got accepted into the Computer Science program as a freshman.

I've been trying to program computers since I first got my hands on one. Once, when the family PC broke, it came back from the repair shop with a christmas card having been pulled from deep inside the floppy drive, because I was playing at operating it. I was probably 5. I made my first web page in the mid-nineties as a pre-teen. Eventually I got a BS in Computer Science, did lots of full-stack development and went on to manage Infrastructure teams first for Yelp and then for Uber. I wrote key pieces of software at both companies, used to manage probably petabytes of data and provide core functionality to tens - hundreds? - of millions of people. And I managed teams that took that even further.

But my earlier forays - writing macro bots on AOL and messing with the eggdrop source code on IRC - were just as meaningful; they hold the same place in my heart, even if they didn't have the same commercial success.

For me, my love of programming has never been about the value delivered. I've never really cared, in my heart, about how meaningful the product was (which is not to say I didn't make career decisions to optimize for that).

There are three things that have always driven me.

The first is an appreciation for the aesthetic elegance of a finely written program. A good source file is like a poem to me; even the paragraphing is part of the code, and I take great pride in crafting it. I never learned to draw or sculpt, but I poured a lot of what I think is a similar energy into my code.

The second is a sort of visceral awe for the speed with which a computer can do something, once I've given it sufficiently elegant instructions. I remember downloading the complete works of Shakespeare off Project Gutenberg in university, and feeding it into a word count program I had written for an intro programming class, and it spat out an answer in less than half a second. Every single word written by the greatest artist of the English language, boiled down to an integer in less than the time it takes a clock to tick. If I hadn't already been sold, that moment would've done it. What power!

And then lastly, I've always appreciated that outside of academia, programming is just a tool to accomplish some other task. I've worked in multiple industries that I wouldn't have known anything about otherwise, because I am skilled operator of a very versatile tool. I have my craft, and I get to apply to a myriad of problems, and that has helped me to build my "ocean" of knowledge an inch deep, which is a source of joy for me.