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

Probably the things I wrote that get the most use are image chipping and embedding components for the Navy's Maritime Domain Awareness system, all of the updated security labeling for the NRO's first-level ground processing, many of the Jenkins pipeline libraries used for development automation within GEOINT programs, and some ETL scrapers for the APIs of various project management systems to pull into a corporate metrics warehouse.

I started out in my mid-30s when I went back to school for Applied Math, originally intending to try for the Army's ORSA program, as Applied Math for most of the past 50 years has inevitably involved a lot of computer programming, then simultaneously discovered I liked programming even more than I liked math, and I wasn't going to be able to stay in the Army thanks to spinal degeneration, so switched to Computer Science.

That said, I'm still largely self-taught anyway. School only goes so far, and most courses expect you to come in already knowing how to do the basics. That involved the same steps to learn anything else, lots and lots of practice. Some books, mostly the C/C++ classics by K&R and Stroustrup, some supplemental courses on specific applications and technology stacks I found in Coursera, and ultimately making my own toy Linux distro with its own package manager and configuration management system after going through Linux From Scratch a bunch of times and getting tired of all the manual steps.

Really, though, how to make anything "meaningful" was mostly learned on the job. Other than I guess tiny utilities that are part of a standard GNU or BSD system, there isn't a whole lot of meaningful software written by one person. Most of it exists for decades and is worked on by hundreds of people who may not even be alive at the same time. Unless you're contributing to some really big OSS project like Linux or Kubernetes, it's hard to get that kind of experience outside of being employed.

That's probably largely due to language choice, though. C and C++ are very mature languages that have been around a long time. No matter what you might want to do with them, chances are a library that provides the bulk of the building blocks you need already exists, thanks to the GNU project, libc specification, OpenSSL, curl, Boost, QuantLib, Armadillo, so many decades of prior work and the fact they've been the major working languages used in universities and research labs. Developers coming up in the JavaScript and Rust ecosystems these days face a more greenfield world where the opportunity to make smaller reusable components still exists, plus the web is inherently a less stable platform than OS APIs, and both of those are less stable than implementing math algorithms that have been known for centuries, so the situation is different there.

I work in aviation safety. I build data pipelines and statistical and AI/ML models to identify potential hazards.

Like many, I'm self-taught and learned to program before formally studying CS in college. I found my dad's copy of the K&R C book and would sneak into my parent's bedroom at night to write code on the family computer (he was jaded from his career and didn't want me to become a coder). I'd debug during the day in school. I found more programming books at the library and learned more languages that way. I mostly learned by building little projects constantly.

Curiosity is what drew me to programming. There was an endless supply of interesting problems to think about and I wanted to figure out how things worked--no different from a budding civil or electrical or mechanical engineer wondering how the infrastructure surrounding them worked. The big difference, I think, is that software is considerably more accessible as a young child than, say, building a bridge or building or robot.

By the way, "Export to CSV" is the most meaningful feature you can add to any project, regardless of purpose.

Well...here goes.

Mom used to have an AOL buddy she always talked to. Di57 was her screen name, and what she called her when talking to us about her. They were about the same age, both married, had kids, etc, so a lot in common. They'd talked for at least a couple years, I guess.

One day the lady asked her if I could write something to see what her family was chatting about... in the guise of 'protecting my family' and nothing more. We figured it was probably about the kids. I forgot what she paid me, $20 or $50. So what I wrote wasn't actually a keylogger, but used win APIs to grab text from IM windows, and store that. Didn't know how to really hide it or piggyback it, so just gave it a name like 'win32xxx' something or other, hell it's been more than 20 years now.

Didn't think much of it really, one day Di57 told my mom her husband was cheating on her with multiple women, telling some his wife was dead, some he wasn't married, some they were separated etc etc. Sad news. They kinda didn't chat much after that.

This is where I get fuzzy because I don't remember exact timelines, but at some point not immediately... I'd guess 4 to 16 months later, her husband died. She was convicted of his murder, and apparently it became a big thing because of cold case or snapped or something or other(I hate those shows). Her name was Diane Fleming...in prison still AFAIK.

I don't say this to brag, or feel any guilt or anything. Just something that always sat in the back of my mind -if- things would have been different if I hadn't done that.

Some of these details and timelines may be off, I guess I never really thought about it much recently. For some reason, I remember us both thinking she was guilty, I think there may have been other pieces of things she'd said I'm forgetting.

> -if- things would have been different if I hadn't done that.

She would have found out some other way and probably with the same result.