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

1,2) Me and a cousin started out making games in Macromedia Flash when i was little kid, Probably when i was 8 or 9. At first it was only copy pasted code and/or keyframing stuff. After i Studied BASIC in 9th grade, got a little more confident and started playing around with ActionScript more. By the 11th grade I was making pretty cool stuff programatically in Flash 5 (or i think was MX by then) I made a lot of game physics and game AI and stuff. In freshmen year in college, i got introduced to C and later C++ and just took off from there, learning mostly by doing, making harder programs etc. Competed in a lot of national level Programming Competitions and won.

3) Recently graduated with a CS major and working at a big software solutions firm, working on enterprise level software for insurance companies.

Btw, i think people should really take up CS in college. While you can learn programming and a ton of languages on your own, there is a lot of timeless theoretical stuff that is best learned in class. Oh and also Software Engineering stuff like "Object Oriented Analysis and Design" or "Requirements Engineering" or "Design Patterns". That stuff comes in handy a lot!

I built a bunch of personal websites, and sold my first professional website (static HTML) to a local estate agent when I was 15, back in 2000. I charged £300 - around $500 at the time. I worked for them for a couple of years, updating properties etc.

I studied Law at university, but worked on websites for my college, the student paper and various sports teams. I started my first startup when I was 19 - I wrote a lot of bad PHP and inline MySQL queries whenever I needed data in what we now call "views". There was no test suite, no version control and I often made changes straight into production, because I couldn't get a LAMP environment running consistently on my PC. This repeatedly took the site down for hours at a time. This was back in 2004. The bad old days.

I took a break from coding to join a management consultancy for almost 3 years, although I ended up automating a lot of my work in Visual Basic (through Excel), and went on to teach the Excel course to colleagues.

I started my second company at the start of 2011, during an enforced 3-month period of "gardening leave" between two jobs. I decided that I wanted to learn how to code properly, so I bought "Agile Web Development with Rails", published by Pragmatic Programmers, and worked through it in about 3 or 4 days, non-stop. This was an epiphany - web development all started to make sense, and we launched the first version of our site about 2 weeks later. I knew enough Ruby to be dangerous, but probably not enough to get a job as a professional programmer.

As my co-founder was teaching himself HTML & CSS at the time, we didn't really have expertise in-house, so I spent a lot of time on the #rubyonrails channel on freenode - a wonderful place to get help on anything Rails related. Stack Overflow was also very useful.

By March or April of 2011, we'd been accepted onto Y Combinator and hired our first (extremely capable) engineer, who had a CS degree. This spurred me on to become more technically capable, so I just started devouring programming books. I've mostly steered away from the classics (Gang of Four just didn't make sense from a Ruby point-of-view), but there are often more practical, up-to-date equivalents in the language of your choice. "Design Patterns in Ruby" and "Eloquent Ruby", both by Russ Olsen, stand out for me.

Ruby Koans, and then implementing a bunch of common sorting algorithms have kept me keen to keep learning the more theoretical side of stuff. I've had a little more time on my hands recently, so I've divided into open-source software - I'm currently trying to help out with Resque 2.0 (pull request coming soon, I promise!).

I've recently played around with Clojure and Go, but I'm struggling to get into them without a practical project to spur me on.

I'd say I'm now competent enough to have a good shot at getting most Ruby-based development jobs out there, if that was a path I wanted to take. And it only took 14 years!

So I taught myself Basic. Later in school I was taught Comal 80, some variation of Cobol taught in Danish schools. I learned Pascal later, also in School. When Internet came to Denmark in 1995 I taught myself PHP v1+2+3, and later Javascript, and started my own little business creating websites, based on a selfmade CMS. PHP + javascript has served me well for 18 years, but I think its time to move on to something like Go - so thats what I am planning now.

Started again properly about a year and a half ago when I began college (I'm 20 now - and I'm doing a Business Management degree), and haven't looked back since. You are right in saying that StackOverflow has literally changed the many people learn code because of how vast its library now is (for iPhone especially). Never had any formal education whatsoever — I've only ever read one book (http://www.apress.com/9781430236023), which was a complete beginner's guide. Everything else has been online tutorials (make sure you do your research and corroborate information on which blogs/sites are best to learn from for your chosen language), and Apple's amazing documentation.

As I am still in college, most of my projects are 'side'-projects, but with each iteration they're getting stronger. Collaborated with an SME to make an educational app and now have a contractual and in-house app lined up before Christmas. It's difficult to freelance like this, but the funding (loan) that comes with going to college means that I haven't needed to find a 'proper' job yet.

Never give up trying to learn, if you enjoy doing it. If you don't enjoy it, don't try to learn it past the point of caring. I constantly felt an 'impostor' syndrome-like feeling when working for the first company I worked with, but in reality, consistent hard work for at least a year will put you ahead of most average outsourcing operations for basic stuff. Try and validate your learning, too — keep a blog and constantly ask questions, either on SO or your language's forum of choice. A milestone for me was when I was accepted on student scholarship to attend WWDC this summer. Take it from me, you can achieve something similar if you make sure you don't slack!

I wish you the best of luck.