Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?

1) How did you learn to code? Totally self taught from books and RTFM // Self taught plus MOOCs or comparable resources // Some classes in college but no CS degree, remainder self-taught // Self taught plus a developer bootcamp or some non-degree related formal education // CS degree and personal efforts

2) When did you start learning (perhaps informative because of the recent rise of MOOCs)?

3) At what point (if yet) did you start working as a programmer professionally relative to your initial efforts?

I had been wondering about this for a bit and the discussion here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6467914) motivated me to finally post it.

Administrative note: I'm below 200karma so I can't make this a poll, if an admin wants to throw some polling categories in here that'd be cool too.

Edit: added quotes to the self-taught in the title since I realized that with the advent of StackOverflow and various other social learning tools that there are very few who can truly claim not to have learned at someone else's digital knee at some point or benefitted from the currently robust community that exists online now.

Moocs can be a better introduction to programming than mere books, but I haven't seen any evidence on how successful MOOCs are at teaching programming.

I did study a uni CS and EE for a couple of years, but left because my school was way behind what was happening in the real world at the time. I was consulting in the IT world, and thought at the time that the CS stuff was hopelessly outdated. I realised years later that I should have stuck with it because now I know that some of the theory is universal and timeless and would have stopped me from reinventing wheels a lot.

I've mainly learned by doing, solving problems using technology. I learned in the beginning from books and usenet, then gopher was my friend and eventually of course the web. I still find a good book is the main foundation I use for learning, supported by things such as forums and MOOCs (I've yet to find a MOOC I agree with, mainly because I am personally not a big fan of video learning - I still like books the most)

I've worked on and off in the IT world for 25+ years, currently I am an English teacher, I do IT projects on the side and I'm about to tackle e-learning head on with a new start-up. I would have trouble finding a job because I have no formal degree (people toss my CV/resume) and I am late to the world of github so nowhere to point people to see my work as most of the problems I have solved are internal problems businesses have. So most of my work comes through word of mouth recommendations, and I only take projects nowadays that have an new, interesting angle for me - point in case I am learning NoSQL and Graphing DBs to create a recommendation system for a network of insurance brokers. (I think the problem could actually be solved trivially with Postgres and judicial use of statistical analysis, so I am creating 2 solutions in parallel to see which one will perform better at scale as well as more accurate). I've never done rec systems before, but I'm a big fan of AI and ML, so this seems like an interesting problem to research and look into, as well as having the opportunity to be a little profitable.

1. Self taught from internet resources and experiments. I still remember stuffing my 128MB flash drive with HTML pages so that I can read them at home. Originally got into programming to cheat in some games. Started with making trainers/ memory editing and bot for MMOs.

2. 3rd year of middle school. Around 2005, I think. Accessed the internet for the first time.

3. Not yet. but I have been trying to learn more about the topic ever since I realize whats possible with it, and my decision to learn more seriously about programming led me to taking CS degree in college.