Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?

I started teaching myself in the early 80s on an Atari 400 with Atari BASIC. At elementary school, I got some coaching from the librarian in Apple Logo. By sixth grade, I had participated in a few school district programming contests.

In junior high, I got involved in modeming and wrote a BBS for my Atari 130XE in Turbo Basic XL. When I got an Atari ST, I released my first public domain program, a VT52 "animation" editor, compiled from GFA Basic.

Afraid of the social stigma of being too involved with computers, I gave up programming for the rest of my teens, only picking it up again in my last years at college, when my curiosity about the expanding Internet led me to explore MUSHes, MOOs and HTML.

I found a job building static intranet pages from technical documentation and learned the basics of JavaScript, although at the time, it wasn't useful for much beyond client-side form validation.

Then I got a customer service job at a rising e-commerce site and began hitting the books in earnest, learning UNIX shell programming, regular expressions, Perl and SQL. I started writing command-line tools and CGI scripts and moved over from customer technical support to working on the customer service toolkit.

I hit a kind of plateau, though I didn't realize it at the time. Though I continued to crank out scripts, my efforts to become effective in compiled languages such as C and Java stalled repeatedly.

Eventually, largely through exposure to the work of experienced developers, I began to understand principles of computer science as well as practices of large-scale software design. As I became comfortable with a greater degree of abstraction, I branched out from reading books on specific programming languages to reading up on broadly applicable concepts and practices. I've been working in software for over 15 years, and I continue to read avidly.

Yeah those shareware disks were such a scam... So much promised and so little worked... And so many copies of PKUNZIP!

No worries for not adhering to the structure, it was just there because I wanted to urge more than "Yes"/"No" replies, I enjoyed reading your post. Very cool story.

I'm self taught at the moment, about to go to a dev bootcamp to really solidify my understanding of web-centric ideas (most of my stuff has been data crunching). Glad to see that so many people are happy in the field without a CS degree.

I am self-taught. And I get asked alot about how I did it.

For me, it happened in two phases.

When I was 14 or some years old, we did not have a computer at home, so the only way I could play with one was to participate in our science fair and work with one. I participated to make a static HTML website that year. I knew nothing about it, so I got a book and learned basic HTML from it and made one. I liked doing that so much so I kept on doing that for 3 years.

Then I picked up some Visual Basic, because I could build some "cool" UI components with that.

Mind you, till here I hadn't taken "official" CS classes.

But then I joined college for CS and hated every bit of it, as most of it was out of touch from reality (maybe specific to my university) so I changed my major to Computer Engineering and then learned programming in this "second phase" on my own while developing projects.

So far that is the best way I know how to actually learn programming. Try to solve a problem. And ask people if you get stuck on something. You will feel like shit every day for awhile, but that would make you a better programmer and a person.

Just learn basic syntax of a programming language. In my second phase I did that with Python (for APIs) and Obj C (for iOS).

Just learned the basic syntax and then mostly relied on the developer documentation (please get used to reading those, that is the best way to stay upto date with any changes that happen in the future). Also, stackoverflow. But only use stackoverflow if you cannot figure it out for days. Try working on it on your own first. mostly things have solutions online. try searching.

But most importantly, build. Build and solve problems. That is the most rewarding and effective way. It would make you a better problem solver.

I hope that helped!

From the outset, I learnt programming by craving to build a thing. It started with tic tac toe that I built in vb6 in school, with computer as a player, sound and lighting effects. Then I built a full-disk media player/ image explorer hybrid. Followed by a multilingual word processor with screen reader and brail keyboard input and ...Finally full-stack web apps.

At the core of my learning was always a desire – that I wanted to build this thing, and rest was the details that I figured out from the internet and MSDN CDs (yes, that used to be my primary and definitive source during initial years of learning.)

In my experience, when I'm passionate about building something, I do not need to motivate myself to learn the details.

Edit: Finally I also did post graduation in CS to cover the gaps of CS fundamentals. Degree is also essential for getting a job at reputed companies which usually have it as the first filter to auto-reject candidates.