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

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

#71

Post by paulbjensen » Mon, Sep 30, 2013, 11:13 AM UTC

After I graduated from university back in 2006 (studying Management Science), I decided that I liked computers more than I liked Banking or Management Consulting, so I worked for a friend of a friend doing web design, and began to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I read the Pragmatic Programmers books, and spent 6 months at home learning Ruby and Rails in my free time.

About a year later (summer 2007), I got a job working for a ticket search engine called Tickex, doing Rails. I was paid £9 per hour, and worked at a BBQ table and chair. It was a really enjoyable time. we were Seedcamp finalists and nearly got funding from Sequoia, but sadly the funding ran out and the business moved back to California and then shut down. Since then, I've worked at a few other startups, at a web agency called New Bamboo, at AOL, and now I work in a small business. I also had offers to interview at Square and Facebook, but a temporary lack of nationality/family circumstances meant that I couldn't move to California.

The decision to deviate from the path offered by my degree has been one of the best in my life. Before I had learnt to program, I had ideas but no ability to program, so they remained as ideas. Having learnt to program, I have the ability to have ideas and do something about them.

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

#72

Post by doctorfoo » Mon, Sep 30, 2013, 11:16 AM UTC

1) Mostly self taught, but a lot of credit goes to helpful people on various game development forums; people who were almost personal tutors, answering any stupid question I had and fixing my code for me. I did do a comp sci degree, but consider it a total waste of time/money (apart from gaining a little appreciation for testing and design patterns).

2) About aged 14, after getting my first PC. In the year 2K!

3) Couple years ago I started earning from it, aged ~24.

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

#73

Post by wut42 » Mon, Sep 30, 2013, 11:17 AM UTC

1) Self taught from RTFM, various websites/tutorials, IRC & mailing lists.

2) Around 12.

3) 19

I first started to hack around on Linux, which progressively moved me to code stuff to hack around.

I've started working at 17 as a system administrator (at an hosting company then a startup), when it occurred to me that most SA work can be automated or controlled by code (I sometimes like to say that system administrators are the result of a code error), so I decided to became more a programmer than a SA around nineteen.

Before that I'd have developed a lot but just personal projects or sysadmin needs.

Since that i've worked in a couple of agencies, done some freelance stuff, and joined two years ago a startup with some ex-colleagues.

I've kept doing sysadmins tasks, perfecting my knowledges and learned new stuff like JavaScript & client side frameworks. I really love my sysadmins skills because I think they make me a better dev, as i'm able to understand how my code will run on the servers and the different complications.

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

#74

Post by junto » Mon, Sep 30, 2013, 11:19 AM UTC

My parents got me an BBC Micro (Model B) when I was about 10 years old. The instruction manual had programming examples in it and I started off copying things out of the user manual. [1]

I took a computer science course in high school and learnt Pascal. I wrote a dinghy sailing (racing) management program when I was 17. I created a windows style GUI using ACSII codes. It worked quite well.

I went to university and was taught C++. I hated it. I wrote some C and Delphi during that time as well. By the end of university I wanted nothing to do with computers. For me, Computer Science in university was a disaster.

I took two years away from computers and worked in a completely different vertical. A friend got me interested in computers and programming again and I got bitten by the bug again.

I learnt some HTML and then got a job at a web agency as a junior trainee. I learnt ASP scripting and SQL. From there I went to work for a big computer company working on their online presence.

From there I bootstrapped my own web development agency (which died) and I've been freelancing ever since.

When ASP.NET came out I taught myself C#. Soon after Ajax became "the thing" so I learnt JavaScript.

Sometimes I have to hack around PHP, Python or Java. I sometimes think I should make the jump to Node or Rails, but all of my industry contacts are tied to Microsoft technologies. For the moment I will stay where the work is, and if it dries up then I'll learn something new.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro

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

#75

Post by rythie » Mon, Sep 30, 2013, 11:20 AM UTC

1) I got started using Basic on BBC micro, using book borrowed from the local library and bit of help from my parents. Not long after I switched to Q Basic on a PC, then Visual Basic. Until I was about 13, all the equipment I used was borrowed from my dad's work, so without that most likely I wouldn't have started that early. I learnt Java at Uni and later PHP. I droped in and out of programming in my teens, I didn't seriously start programing bigger projects until Uni.

2) I must have been 9 or 10 when I started.

3) I got paid to do some static HTML stuff when I was 16 but I first go paid to do code when I was 20.

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

#76

Post by jim_lawless » Mon, Sep 30, 2013, 11:21 AM UTC

1)

Early 80's: TRS-80 / Apple / C64 BASIC, Z-80, and 6502 assembly-language via books and the wealth of magazines available.

Mid 80's: Turbo Pascal via a local CP/M community and a couple of books. I did take an introductory Pascal class.

Mid/late 80's: C, 80x86 assembly-language, and AWK from books and magazines and by necessity at my job.

90's: C++, SQL, Perl, Java, JavaScript HTML, and many other "learned as needed" languages in the profession. I used Delphi, C, Perl, and TCL for various side-projects.

I work primarily in Java, JavaScript, HTML. As a hobby, I like to tinker with Lua, Clojure, Erlang, and Go. While I still buy books, I depend more on the Internet community for more timely information and for code reviews and such. Publishing code for all to see via a blog or Github is a great way to invite constructive criticism and to learn the philosphy ( and not just the syntax ) of a particular programming language discipline.

Beyond coding I picked up development strategies ... version-control, team coding strategies, testing methodologies, ...etc. initially from the job, supplemented by reading material.

2) I was 15 when I started learning basic in 1980.

3) I was 21 when I got my first full-time programming job, but it was unrelated to my self-taught skills, at the time. I had taken vocational training in IBM mainframe ( COBOL, Assembler ) technologies and worked in those for about a year-and-a-half before I moved onto a new-to-the-company MS-DOS team ( programming initially in C ).

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

#77

Post by sambeau » Mon, Sep 30, 2013, 11:24 AM UTC

ikura wrote: post #46

sambeau wrote: post #10

I learned to program in C in the late 80s, before the web, and then went on to do a CS degree at university. Learning to code was very difficult in those days. 1. There were no free compilers outside of academia. 2. Compilers cost hundreds of dollars 3. Programming books cost $50 each I used to buy $5 shareware disks that claimed to have compilers and tutorials on them and they never had exactly what was advertised.…

I challenge you on #1/#2 since there was Personal C (PCC) around the mid/late 80s. The version I had didn't have a graphics library though, so I learnt 8086 assembler and CGA/EGA calls (memory is hazy here, but probably CGA) and made my own :) I was lucky enough to be leant a good C book by a family friend (whoops... Still have it almost 30 years later!!). But I agree with your overall point that it was much harder t…

I was on the Amiga at that point and even if there was a free compiler it was never on the shareware disk it was supposed to be on and there was usually a bit missing. I got a copy of Turbo-C (with a book, maybe?) and programmed (on a PC) at work after hours.

I, too, learnt assembly mostly because there were a few good free assemblers available.

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

#78

Post by stiff » Mon, Sep 30, 2013, 11:25 AM UTC

If you are serious about programming and have any possibility of doing this at all, by all means get a CS degree at the best university you can access. I have worked with or interviewed a few programmers without any university degree and time and time again their confidence in how getting a degree is a total waste of time was directly proportional to their ignorance of basic facts from various areas of CS and inability to solve problems in a systematic way.

A lot of those people simply never get any external validation, have problems getting along with other people, and are unable to accept any kind of mentoring (while they desperately need it), in the end growing up believing in the greatness of their skills which in reality are not even mediocre. Since this seems to be the reason a large fraction of people does not finish their degrees, by this point as a recruiter I would just not hire a person without a degree.

For this reason, I would also ignore a lot of the testimonies that invariably will appear here of self-taught programmers proclaiming supposedly doing great, unless they have projects and code to back their claims up.

There certainly are exceptions, but do not start with the belief you will be one. Getting the same kind of wide perspective you get from a college degree from self-studying is several times as hard. I have self-studied mathematics after finishing my CS degree for a few years now and that's my practical experience. If you don't have the possibility to attend university, make sure to get as many opportunities as possible of verifying and testing your skills in different areas and stay modest.

This post by Notch of Minecraft fame illustrates all that I have said very well:

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/15782716917/coding-skill-and-th...

As far as practical advice goes, as soon as you are able to at all write working programs of non-trivial complexity (say, a platform game) MIT OCW is the place to be:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

Taking those four courses in this order will provide a great basis, but I would be surprised if someone would be able to complete those in less than two years when self studying (I solved most exercises from SICP, learned a lot, but took me more than a year). To get the equivalent of a university degree, you would still need to heavily study at least four more topics: networking & security, compilers, operating systems and databases. Those two books might be a reasonable shortcut to learn some of this:

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-...

Source: I started working full-time as a developer when I was 19 and did it ever since, did a four year CS degree as evening studies after work (already having significant programming experience when starting the degree) and spent a significant amount of time self-studying (I worked through almost all of SICP, read the "Dragon Book", wrote a compiler etc.). I would never be where I am today (wherever it is) without teachers and colleagues from the university, there would be just lots and lots of gaps in my knowledge I would never get aware of.

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

#79

Post by aegiso » Mon, Sep 30, 2013, 11:29 AM UTC

It started when I was a gradeschooller, with a debug mode cheat code in Sonic The Hedgehog 2. I became obsessed with how I could break the game's rules, and it singlehandedly taught me what I call "programmer's logic" -- understanding intuitively the principles of how programs are nothing more than mechanistic reactions to states. By the time I wrote my first program, I knew how to code. One of the first things I wrote was a 15-page multiplayer Pacman with a level editor, which I did with trial and error and reading help pages.

It wasn't long before I discovered the internet and started breaking things on AOL. It was almost all exploration, with a bit of RTFM and IRC thrown in.

I ended up going to school for CS but that what nothing more than a formality to land a west coast tech company job.

I'm not convinced there's any way to cheat this process. I think you just need to have an insatiable curiosity, seriously intrinsic motivation, and 10,000 hours.

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

#80

Post by Romoku » Mon, Sep 30, 2013, 11:29 AM UTC

1) I started with some High School courses in VB6/VB.NET/C++. Eventually I stumbled upon C# which I fiddled around with for several years. I had some college, but I quickly realized I preferred writing useful applications to studying theory.

2) Reading through these posts makes me feel like I started learning later (15/16).

3) After I landed the internship I effectively dropped out of college and started working as a contractor. I hope to go back one day, but I have too much fun with my day jobs to take a break.