41–50 of 68 posts
Both parents were programmers. Mom has been retired since before I was born, Dad is still working as a DBA nearing retirement. My brother and I are both employed as programmers, and my sister is due to graduate this summer with a CS degree.
You must have great Christmas dinners!
Most classes I took were on word or excel. Had a bit of side influence from local pc users group and BBS environments. Doom, and subsequently, the doom hackers guide, were probably one of those chief influences that subsequently saw me start to take things apart and realize how they all worked and fit together. Had friends that I got together with over IRC and gamed with. More games followed.
Started IT in university, but dropped out after the first year because using eiffel was the most boring experience I'd ever had, and not what I enjoyed about using computers. Continued tinkering in various tasks/languages as needed over the years, but never really got past the basic ability to use loops/arrays/conditionals, etc.
Things really got serious when I decided to use employment to learn. Figured I might as well get something out of a paid job, and decided I'd challenge myself to program everything I had to do at work, not use any of the pre-prepared solutions. I learnt SQL in which i tried to do everything. Then i moved on to imperative C-style languages, and tried to do everything in that. Then learnt regular expressions. Then used C. All along this time I kept bumping into python because I began to experiment with ubuntu. Lastly, after doing all that, I decided I wanted a language that was compiled, had good performance, was functional, had macros, and was free. I discovered and taught myself lisp.
From the SQL period on, i can't say i ever had anyone else to guide me. I just kept picking up new stuff, and challenging myself to do everything from the ground up. Every time I found something I couldn't do, or something I didn't understand, I kept at it until i did. Somehow, at the end of it all, I'm a guy with qualifications in other fields that really became a programmer anyway...and now knows more than most of the IT guys :(
One of my parents was a programmer and yet nobody mentored me! Which probably explains why my dad is a systems programmer writing drivers for Windows and I'm using Haskell on Linux to do programming language stuff with a healthy dose of PL theory. Hard to imagine any way to be so different while staying in the same field.
My father? He went through to a professional degree in chemicals, and still didn't know what simmetry is and wasn't able to understand it when I tried to explain it to him.
She had a huge influence on me and I will forever be proud of her.
One day I was playing a game on my ZX Spectrum micro-computer (I was 9 or 10 at the time) when something unexpected happened. The loader threw an exception and I was presented with a weird listing of words and numbers which turned out to be program's source code. Something told me to mess around with it, I changed a few names and numbers and somehow managed to run the program. It worked and funnily enough, the things…
I started hacking on a ZX Spectrum, initially via the orange manual, later with books from the library and so on.
After BASIC I jumped to assembly, and kept up on assembly on MS-DOS 3.3, via Ralph Brown's interrupt list. I didn't try pascal, or any other real language, until many years later at university.
One of my parents was a programmer and yet nobody mentored me! Which probably explains why my dad is a systems programmer writing drivers for Windows and I'm using Haskell on Linux to do programming language stuff with a healthy dose of PL theory. Hard to imagine any way to be so different while staying in the same field.
I did pair with a same aged friend. We co-learned BASIC and Z80 assembler at the age of 12.