I was in the Army and ended up in a research facility. The first computer I programmed on we had to assemble first and we entered the program by flipping switches on the front panel. After a while we graduated to using a Model 33 teletype and a paper tape reader and we only had to enter the boot code via the switches. I found that I really liked the challenge of figuring out how to make the machine do what I wanted and continued from there. This was in 1976.
Ask HN: How did you become a software engineer?
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Re: Ask HN: How did you become a software engineer?
#821993 - I was born in a dead boring town and was very shy. In this context my dad's computer was utterly awesome.
2001 - After seeing my brother coding in Clipper 5 I wanted to do the same. I didn't have manuals or Internet access (I lived in the 3rd world) so I reverse engineered my brother's code to learn.
2003/2004 - Fell in love with infosec. Low level code for crackers, network protocols, etc. Already had a basic internet connection and I was really happy learning.
2011 - Went to the uni to meet other people like me and finally master all these "hackers stuff" I loved. Uni was underwhelming and time-consuming but got a few good friends and started loving software development.
2016 - After years of being working on side projects and teaching at uni I finally got my first job as developer.
2021 - Not really happy spending my time in meetings and fire fighting production issues. Thinking about what I want to do next.
Re: Ask HN: How did you become a software engineer?
#83I started programming in about 7th grade. A website/game I enjoyed was Neopets. Neopets allowed you to create grounds called guilds which had HTML pages you could customize, so I learned HTML. Later on I started playing Minecraft. I was interested in running a public server and creating a community, so I learned the basics of system administration (ssh, ftp, bash, linux, website domains, etc.). This was extremely hel…
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