Ask HN: How did you get started in tech and/or Linux?

Got home PC with internet connection in 1995, when I was just 6 years old, and immediately fell in love with the machine. Started toying with QBASIC a couple of years later, read through Knut in middle school, the switches for math-oriented high school and implemented Mixx interpreter as a school project. Dropped out if uni and after several years as a game designer switched to engineering, which was a pretty easy transition.

Had a Linux as a main system couple of times, did LFS, but still don't consider myself very knowledgeable about it.

Same here... I started using Linux in '98, for some uni project work.

My dad was a pretty big factor. He worked for a series of tech companies in the 80s and 90s (DEC, Zoom Telephonics, etc.), so our home always seemed to be on the bleeding edge - we got DSL in 1997, Wi-Fi in 2000, etc. The 386 PC was part of the home since I was about three.

He rescued an old Compaq 486 for me out of a dumpster at work when I was seven. I got to "help" install Windows 3.1 off a SyQuest drive, and in the ensuing years helped install/configure staples like a Sound Blaster, a CD drive, a Super VGA card, and the like. I broke this machine _a lot_. Eventually, I started learning to fix it myself.

In 2001 he built a PC from scratch. This PC ran Mandrake 8.1, which was a completely new paradigm to both of us. Although he abandoned it, I was hooked - I'd go spend time in the basement just to tinker with it, even though I had my own perfectly capable PC upstairs. Eventually I got a discarded Pentium machine and installed a slightly newer Mandrake on it.

By 2008, I had several such discarded machines. I think at this point I was running Debian on them, Mandrake having become Mandriva (and generally awful).

In college, I was "that guy" who ran Linux in a VM, and could do all of the lab work remotely from my dorm with X forwarding off the big, beefy Solaris boxes. I even bought a tablet PC off eBay, installed Linux on it (I think it was Ubuntu), and got permission from many professors to sub out a TI-83 for MATLAB, again running via forwarding.

I got a job out of college doing at-scale release and infrastructure management, starting with just a bunch of shell scripts, eventually graduating to tools like Chef and Ansible, later Docker and later still orchestrators like Kubernetes. At my second job I learned way more than I wanted to about how the Linux kernel worked, due to a kernel bug that sometimes robbed us of about 400MB of memory.

I decided to switch to Linux (Fedora) full-time in 2015, and haven't looked back.

In short: - I was incredibly lucky to have a dad who cared about tech. - I was also incredibly lucky to grow up when discarded tech was still a useful learning tool. (Can a five-year-old tablet even speak modern TLS these days?) - I loved finding new ways to use and learn about Linux, and I grasped at many chances.

Flash. Yup, the one that we all killed a few years ago completely.

I was in school, in my 12s or so, and was fascinated in those cool Flash animations and games on websites in early 2000s. Then a friend of mine showed me a very simple animation that he made, and I asked him how he did it. He showed me Flash MX (I think it was the version back then) and I quickly got the logic of keyframes, layers, and movie clips. I've also learned those things called "scripts" that we could attach to objects and write things like "gotoAndPlay(5)" to control the clip. Then I've realized that there are more, much of those scripts...

Then I got interested in "hacking" in high school and using a custom written IE close that redirects anything to Facebook or Hotmail (FB was just getting super popular and Hotmail was still much more used than Gmail) to my own server at home which I wrote to listen for any requests and log username/password combinations... which gained me access to about a total of ~100 accounts. There was also a day where I brute forced our high school's student information system (where students logged in to see their grades etc) to find out everybody's password, I told this to my friends all everybody was just asking me for their password instead of paperwork with school administration.

Then in college I got into a bit lower lever on the stack: sniffing our (back-then unencrypted/open) school's Wifi in monitor mode, or anonymously joining the network and using Ettercap to do MitM attacks to hijack people's, again, Facebook and a few other social accounts' sessions (HTTP was still the default and many people other than the 1% tech savvy would use Facebook over plaintext HTTP), successfully logging in as a few folks. It's unbelievable that we had a open plaintext Wifi on campus and most of the sites were using HTTP, so all the session data was literally traveling unencrypted in air, just 10 years ago.

Then my motivation shifted to more producive things like web development, and I was already very fluent in C# and got my first few real, paying jobs in ASP.NET development. Then I completely abandoned Microsoft stack and fell in love anything that is Unix-like, went into mobile apps, where I developed some iOS apps (also a few Android ones) natively.

Then there were a few brief moments of getting into cryptocurrency in 2013 (using school computer lab GPUs to mine Litecoin and Feathercoin (which was a thing at that time)), and writing simple market analyzers, trading bots and Telegram pump-n-dump watchers in the ICO hype in 2017.

And here I am now, still developing apps (though now I'm on TypeScript/React Native territory), I also design the UI/UX of the apps that I'm building from the blend of wording to pushing my technical limits into making cool animations/transitions etc... and I still feel the spirit of Flash motivation.

And if you ask whether I feel guilty for what I've done in terms of compromising accounts: Never. I'm so happy that I did them all when I could; I never harmed anyone and it was a great motivation to learn how networking worked in a lower level.

This is my humble story, and if there is only one outcome:

Motivation is everything.

I had a very unusual childhood. I learned to read at only 4 years old, which opened so many doors for me. By the time I was 7, I had read the "Black & Decker's Guide to Home Wiring" so many times, I bought some parts at Walmart and built a working electric lamp from the book. (And, to the shock of my family, an electrician later inspected it and said I had done everything correctly and it was completely safe to use.) By the time I was 9, my focus had switched to computers and building apps that ran on them. I downloaded a copy of Visual Basic .NET Express and (on a different track) got an Arduino UNO from my family for Christmas.

After some time building Windows apps and seeing that was not the future, I switched to learning PHP and downloaded my first Linux distro - Ubuntu 11.04. I got my first client at 14 freelancing software development. Later, I learned Laravel and re-wrote that app in a proper, cleanly-developed framework. I'm 19 now, finishing my AA degree, and the client is considering hiring me long-term instead of the occasional freelance project. I'm still open to new stuff though. :)

What is interesting, looking back, is about how much has changed since I learned programming. I really started with websites when I was around 10-11 years old, and everything was PHP, JQuery, WordPress, MySQL, Apache, the like. Windows XP was still quite common and my main development PC. Even though I still use those technologies, it is truly amazing how much has changed. Node, Express, MongoDB, Laravel, Redis, Linux Mint... they all didn't exist yet. It feels like web programming has changed completely, and I'm not that old!