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

I'm 45. I got started by books when I was about 8: The little public library near my home had translations of the Usborne BASIC guides and Tim Hartnell's game books and I devoured those without having a computer to try them on. Then my uncle bought an Spectrum 48k and I spent every Saturday morning going to his place, playing some games and typing some code from one of the books, or modifications I had concocted in a notebook during the week. My parents bought us an MSX, probably by 1986 and I kept doing some BASIC (but mostly playing games).

Then came an hiatus, from 1988 to about 1993 I became the stereotypical teenager, so motorcycles, booze and girls seemed way more interesting. I always regret it a bit, because I feel I could have learned a lot during those years.

In 1993 I started Physics at college and my parents bought me a 386 PC. That thing must have costed like $3000. I did little Physics, but sure gamed an awful lot on that thing. But I also taught myself C.

Then in 1995 I discovered a little room in the Physics department that had two unsupervised old PCs connected to something called the Internet. I was hooked instantly and squatted that room for hours every day with a bunch of similarly inclined students. We downloaded NASA pics, connected to chat rooms and MUDs and hacked into the mail server to steal unused email accounts for ourselves. One day someone from that room handed me a bunch of floppies with Slackware Linux on it.

I switched to CS the next term, and finished it, but on the side: by 1996 I had a web dev job.

Most of the jobs I've held have been pretty full-stack: from sliding the servers into the rack to whipping up a decent logo in Gimp and everything in between. I keep doing the same and I love being self-sufficient, but sometimes envy people that are really really good at something. But I never found anything I would leave all the rest for.

I got a distribution from a computer magazine that was hastily packaged. It was a CDrom of a version of linux that runs under DOS with LOADLIN, had a filesystem called umsdos that s basically FAT (fat32?) with extra files for metadata. Unfortunately it seems the distribution didn't fit in the magazines' CDROM so they left out some directories, crucially /usr/man so most of the man pages were missing. It wasnt a linux magazine so there were absolutely no instructions.I didnt have internet access so it was impossible to figure out what to do. All the commands i could figure out were "cd" and "more" and "dir" (it was aliased to ls as i found out later). I somehow ended up finding some README files and similar and over time learned the basics. The rest is far less exciting to remember.

In the mid-late 90's, our family got a computer. None of use really knew much about them, but Mom saw it for sale at some rent-to-own place and picked one up. It came with a free AOL trial and before you knew it we were on the Internet.

It was really cool to chat and meet people from all over. It felt like an exclusive club and I soon found myself addicted. It was common to occasionally get in little arguments with other users, especially other young teens. One of these incidents resulted in me being kicked offline by one of the users. When I dialed back up I asked them how they had done it and he was cool enough to show me how to use a punter - a program to 'punt' people offline.

From there I learned about other 'progs', programs that ranged from scrolling endlessly in chats to the more nefarious that allowed one to steal passwords. This intro to "hacking" led me to my first foray into programming with Visual Basic 5, so I could write my own progs.

Eventually I graduated from "hacking" on the AOL service and started reading anything I could find about real hacking. At the time it was believed you couldn't hack on Windows, so I _had_ to learn Unix. Started with some free shell accounts, learned some of the CLI and quickly got banned. I realized my own option was to run it myself. Found out about Redhat Linux and eventually got it to boot. I ran into so many issues that required constant troubleshooting. This sort of led me to fall in love with fixing things instead of just trying to break them. Just stayed with it for the next couple decades.

He was going to keep writing but the loftmate unplugged his power.

I never thought I'd be a programmer. I actually took HTML in grade school (late 90s) and C++ in high school, but they didn't stick. (Of course now I wish they did!) I originally went to school for TV production, which I had worked in at a local news station all through high school, but wound up getting into a band, took some time off to try that out, and then went back to community college for music.

I started hacking around with windows mobile circa 2006, not really programming but taking the OS apart and making custom ROMs and whatnot. A while later I decided to take a networking course as an elective, because I had been getting more interested in tech. The teacher was all about networking as a field that you didn't have to get more than a two year degree plus some certs for, and I thought hey, I like this enough, they'll be plenty of jobs, and it's not much school. So I changed my major.

The next year my mom (who teaches at a college) said "Go see if they have any internships", so I did. The lady at the department checked what she had and said "Here's something at (a major media company) as a web producer, is that applicable to your major?" "Sure!" I half-lied immediately, because it sounded very cool. The internship was great, but beyond just CMS/production stuff, they throw Javascript/JQuery at me. I got hooked immediately. I guess I was always a tinkerer and problem solver, but I hadn't realized how much fun solving all these little problems and getting to see what I built come to fruition was for me. I bought some books, started teaching myself web dev and Linux (which had always intrigued me, and by '08 I had a server running FreeBSD serving up my music collection for all my friends out of my parents' house. When I graduated with a network admin degree in '10, one of my teachers immediately got me a job at a liquor store doing web and IT.

The great postscript to this is that today, after working in a few different places across the spectrum of web and hosting, I'm back at the media company as a software engineer.