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

The word 'meaningful' may be a bit ambiguous. It infact is. By 'meaningful' software I mean any software that has meaning to you or your customer. The thing is you deliver value in one way or the other. E.g: You write and maintain an open-source package used by quite a few people. Or maybe you wrote and website as a hobby. Now, it is used by quite a few people so you maintain it and the revenue it generates is your primary source of income.

If the above description fits you, can you recall how you learned to program and build meaningful things? More importantly what drew you towards programming, and not another subject? And if possible, mention THE meaningful software you wrote.

I have 42 github stars, I suspect that's not impressive but perhaps meaningful enough.

>Now, it is used by quite a few people so you maintain it and the revenue it generates is your primary source of income.

I kind of wish I knew how to do that. I have 2 fully functioning products but I have no idea how I go about trying to sell them and give random people access and support problems etc. All the while still holding a job so I can pay the bills.

>If the above description fits you, can you recall how you learned to program and build meaningful things? More importantly what drew you towards programming, and not another subject? And if possible, mention THE meaningful software you wrote.

So I went to college whose tagline was that you are already skilled sysadmin and you want to upgrade or refresh your skills. In reality it was a class full of people who vaguely knew how to type.

So in my boredom I bought a 'learn C programming' book and taught myself how to program. I had already known bash and dos pretty well. C# and .net probably would have been the better choice but they were new at the time and not linux compatible.

The awful syntax of C really damaged my software development track. Many years later I got into python and frankly I wish I had gotten into python forever before. Now I love programming.

So my 2 private projects. 1 is a honeypot network which produces a threat feed of ip address in txt and stix output. Pretty much all the usual nextgen firewalls can ingest and block traffic.

The other is an NCM built with django. If pulls configs off the usual networking devices but also effectively runs a report to tell you what rules you are breaking in the security hardening guide.

I build open source software, I have one project with nearly 2k stars. It is a product itself and used by thousands of people. I do this while also holding a job as open source doesn't pay (although I do have donations).

I've always enjoyed learning and coding, especially when I was in college. I remember in High School I learned about VB in Word and fell in love with how fun it was (not the language). That sealed me in and during college I would learn and code for fun, rather than do the homework assignments. I've always really loved it.

I've learned from watching youtube, reading articles, reading pull requests in software I liked or used, and just doing it. For the project above, I did it in Angular, something I already learned from work and C#, something I had touched a bit in college but due to the cross platform (.net 5), i picked it up as something to learn. Bought 1 course on Udemy, watched half of it and started coding. It was always a program to meet my needs but the lack of competition made me release it and grow with the communities needs as well.

For anyone interested: https://github.com/Kareadita/Kavita

I started with BASIC out of books and magazines on an Apple ][e when I was in 3rd grade. My mother was (still is, actually) a software engineer in the aerospace industry so I had a lot of help getting started.

Later, I moved on to Amos on the Amiga and then C (Turbo C on DOS at first) on the PC during middle school/high school. The web came along at some point during this and I started in on Perl and HTML.

Got a proper CS education at college :) and after graduating went into the Army for 4 years (this was back in 2002).

After that, got into the aerospace/defense industry doing C++ and Ada. Later, moved over to more IC-flavored work mostly in Java, with some Scala and Clojure mixed in.

These days, I'm out of government work doing Clojure all day in fintech.

Still learning to program. The meaningfulness of my work has varied over the years :)

I've tried to spin up various side projects (both open source and not) but have not been very successful at creating anything with staying power.

While I have never managed to create any software as meaningful as the level I hoped my career would reach, writing code has after all given me a lifelong career, so the things I've made must have meant something to someone.

I was a child, and computers were fascinating. I wanted to learn everything about them. When someone showed me that I could write a program of my own, that I could make the computer do what I wanted it to - that was it. I dug into programming just as hard as I see some kids now dig into video games, and I kept that exploration up for decades.

Much of my career I've spent trying to pass along something like that formative experience: in various ways, building tools which empower people to take greater control of their own computers.