Personal curiosity as I am a college sophomore who has been programming for a year, self taught because I’m in a different major. Most stories I see on HN are “I started BASIC when I was 9” so I was curious for the other perspective closer to mine.
Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you discover programming?
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Re: Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you discover programming?
#2You started before me!
I bought a book on PHP the fall of my sophomore year of college. I'd built websites and sorta knew how to create tags and CSS basics, but I'd never dealt with programming logic before.
Best decision of my life.
I grew up in Birmingham, AL and graduated high school in 2009. Our school didn't offer CS. Nobody's parents were computer programmers. Everybody's parents worked in medicine or law or banking or cooking or something along those lines. Nobody I knew - except for another kid named Robert - knew that programming computers was even a thing that kids like us could do. Robert and I would make stop-motion videos with Legos as kids, played with cameras and video editing and special effects.
I think Robert is the only other person in my graduating class of 348 people (348 quite smart people - we had 29 National Merit Finalists our graduating year!) who have learned about programming thus far. I think my high school finally started offering CS last year.
For me, I was trying to build an SMS group messaging app (this was before GroupMe or WhatsApp or anything else like that). I couldn't find anybody to build it. The summer of my sophomore year of college, GroupMe had been built and sold to MSFT for $100 million. I decided, "Why can't I learn to program? Then I won't have to find somebody else to make my next idea." I fell in love with programming!
The spring of my sophomore year, I also enrolled in CS 101 (I ended up minoring in CS, although reading books and doing online tutorials was far more helpful). The professor, who wrote compilers for IBM for over two decades, said at the start of the class, "You are in the right place. When I showed up at college, I'd never seen a computer before. I went on to have a thrilling 25-year career." Since I imagined everybody else had been programming in their basement since they were 8yo, I was relieved.
It's never too late to start something. I wrote this article about collecting sand when I was a kid (which relates to this very topic). It made it to the front page here on HN which I thought was neat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22131552
Re: Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you discover programming?
#3Got to college not even knowing how to type - hadn’t used a computer at all but decide to study computer engineering.
One major advantage is you didn’t take anything for granted... e.g 101 level classes were truly useful to me.
Re: Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you discover programming?
#4You started before me! I bought a book on PHP the fall of my sophomore year of college. I'd built websites and sorta knew how to create tags and CSS basics, but I'd never dealt with programming logic before. Best decision of my life. I grew up in Birmingham, AL and graduated high school in 2009. Our school didn't offer CS. Nobody's parents were computer programmers. Everybody's parents worked in medicine or law or ba…
This was a good read, thank you - I'm also getting a minor due to my school not letting me change my major to an engineering discipline without being set back more years than I can afford.
Re: Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you discover programming?
#5You started before me! I bought a book on PHP the fall of my sophomore year of college. I'd built websites and sorta knew how to create tags and CSS basics, but I'd never dealt with programming logic before. Best decision of my life. I grew up in Birmingham, AL and graduated high school in 2009. Our school didn't offer CS. Nobody's parents were computer programmers. Everybody's parents worked in medicine or law or ba…
This was a good read, thank you - I'm also getting a minor due to my school not letting me change my major to an engineering discipline without being set back more years than I can afford.
That was the same for me. I was studying econ and philosophy in A&S. Unless you started in the Engineering School as a Freshman, you simply wouldn't have enough time to get all the credits for a major there.
The best way to prepare for the job market though is to build things and publish them.
I do wish I could go back and pay more attention in the CS classes I did take.
Re: Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you discover programming?
#6I was working in manufacturing after getting a degree focused on quality assurance & management. I started to hate the work and the fact that my employment was dependent on a large company in a field that was moving outside the US.
Ive always been really fascinated by computers. I'd built plenty of them but never got into the software side and had no idea how it worked. I started teaching myself on the job by starting projects that I could accomplish by programming. That was 2 years ago, now I am on a datascience team doing my work in python. I started teaching myself when I was late 20s.
Re: Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you discover programming?
#7There used to be magazines that would print, line by line, entire programs in BASIC for pages and pages. I did those as a kid on a C64. That definitely wasn't programming because I was basically just reading a recipe.
I officially took a BASIC class in Jr. High, but shortly after that, x86 took over and I really didn't do much with computers throughout high school. I got a PowerBook 145 for college where I majored in econ.
My advisor somehow got me an account on a VAX machine and that's where it all started. I was one of the first at my school to have email. Played around with some MUDs, gopher, ftp archives, etc. I eventually started goofing around with HTML. That was far more interesting than my econ work. I looked at changing majors, but my school's CS dept was severely behind (late 90's by this time. The only thing they were teaching was C and Assembly with no internet technologies. I heard they didn't add Java until the early 2000's.
Dropped out because by this time if you could spell programmer, you got a pretty good job as one. I was floating around with frontend stuff, but knew I had to learn backend as quickly as possible. I bought Fast and Easy PHP by Julie Meloni (which I still have!) to help a local animal shelter build a huge database driven site. It was one of the first in the state. That was a game-changing resume item at the time.
Now here we are. Go/Python/Node are my primary tools these days. I eventually did finish my econ degree, but my career is software engineering.
Re: Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you discover programming?
#8I was a health science major in college spending a lot of my free time programming an LP-MUD (this was mid-90s). I think it was my sister who said that I seemed much more interested in programming than health science. I switched into CS about a year later. If I had been smarter and ambitious enough I would have double-majored in CS and Health Science.
Fwiw, I had zero to little real programming experience prior to enrolling in CS. It was a hard road but well worth it.
Re: Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you discover programming?
#9Graphic Design -> Web Design -> Wordpress Sites -> Front End Dev
Re: Ask HN: Late-bloomer engineers, when and how did you discover programming?
#10You started before me! I bought a book on PHP the fall of my sophomore year of college. I'd built websites and sorta knew how to create tags and CSS basics, but I'd never dealt with programming logic before. Best decision of my life. I grew up in Birmingham, AL and graduated high school in 2009. Our school didn't offer CS. Nobody's parents were computer programmers. Everybody's parents worked in medicine or law or ba…
I think PHP will end up being the BASIC of our generation. It was so easy to pickup and understand. The fact that it was really a templating language helped people make that jump from static HTML -> programming in small increments. And once you knew PHP, you weren't locked into web-dev. You could easily leverage your knowledge into systems development; I think roughly 40% of my PHP work ended up being backend utilities for Linux.