I got started because I always wanted to make games. I was just wondering how other people got started.
Ask HN: How did you get started with programming?
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Re: Ask HN: How did you get started with programming?
#2I was eager to grow into being more than a web designer so I began watching Tuts+ courses on Ruby and PHP. Then, my employer needed a small web app to share documents with clients. I volunteered and the rest is history. Looking back I guess I just decided it was something I wanted to do and I dove head first. Everything I know is self taught and I try to learn something new everyday. It has been very rewarding for me. My boss has trusted me with more projects and I'm more involved in the success of our company.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started with programming?
#3Way back when, I played a game called Club Penguin with my friends. As we played more and more of it, we discovered easter eggs, bugs, and other little oddities. At lunch we were talking and decided that we wanted to make a website about Club Penguin. That night I wrote my first line of code.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started with programming?
#4I was doing QA and needed to automate my work. (Because I am lazy) Selenium was the best tool to use at the time and it was a PHP shop so I picked up enough to write test scripts. Later I discovered Python and fell in love :)
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started with programming?
#5When I was thirteen, the dad of one of my friends was a software engineer, and he liked to tell stories about cool stuff he did (he's a pentester). I was interested, so he gave me a CD (7 or 8 years old, though I didn't know it) of Knoppix Linux and told me to look up C tutorials. I did, and was hooked. I still remember my first two compiler errors: (1) the version of gcc was old enough that it required a newline at the end of the file, which I had neglected, and (2) I thought I understood the idea of a function well enough to know that it didn't really matter what you called them, as long as you were consistent; turns out "main" is actually an important name.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started with programming?
#6When I was 10 years old (1985) my mother bought me a BBC Micro Model B, and I vividly remember her saying "You're not going to just play games on it!", so I started reading the manual, which was pretty much completely about how to program in BBC Basic (there was 6502 assembler in there too).
Never looked back after that!
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started with programming?
#7My AP Calc teacher gave me Scratch[1] and told the class to make a game as our final project. IMO, I made a fairly cohesive game (shown here[2]). There is still some room for improvement, but it's fairly complete and functional.
Oh, and the first (and only) comment (by my best friend)?
> you should consider computer programming as a career
Yup, that plus math.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started with programming?
#8I no longer remember exactly how, given it was so long ago. But for some number of years prior to 1982 I had coaxed my parents into getting me a subscription to Popular Electronics. They often had "computer" articles where one could build one's own computer from discrete components and a CPU. This was the days when an 8080 or a Z80, a breadboard, and a few misc. TTL logic chips could almost suffice to build an actual computer.
Then for Christmas of 1980 or 1981 (I no longer remember which) a Sinclair ZX-81 was under the tree. If it was 1980 I would have then been 13. The ZX got a bunch of usage, but being chained to it's audio cassette tape interface for storage (read: didn't work so well....) meant most of the usage was pure play, like printing 1-100 to the screen and so forth. Which when one is 13, and "programming" a computer for the first time, seems magical.
1982 plays a key role because in 1982, my parents (well, more my Dad, but) decided to get an Atari 800. Auspiciously the reason was so that Dad could automate the weekly task of computing the score-sheet for his bowling league (he was secretary of the league at that time, and one of his tasks was calculating up the weekly averages, scores, handicaps, etc.) Well, Dad wasn't (and still isn't) any form of a computer programmer, so the reality was that I was "volunteered" to write the program that would automate the league calculation work.
That "task", which I gladly took up, so I voluntarily volunteered myself, would be how/why I got my "start". And I've been at it ever since.
In any case, I'd probably have taken up the craft one way or the other, it just so happens that this way turned out to be the how/why.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started with programming?
#9Worked through a "teach yourself HTML" tutorial on AOL. This must have been early 2000s. I remember being fascinated from the get-go. The concept that this was how you build web pages was just incredible to me.
To practice, I built all kinds of toy sites. Fan pages for bands I liked. Homepages for myself. I would take a site and try to duplicate it. Anything.
Then I learned about servers and hosting so other people could view my sites.
Eventually I picked up PHP which really opened my eyes to what could be done with websites.
Somehow or another I found Python. Mark Pilgrim's "Dive into Python" made the language click in a way other tutorials never did.
Found Django shortly thereafter (2007-ish) and the rest is history.
Re: Ask HN: How did you get started with programming?
#10I had a very good teacher in high school. Years later, it seems like a second nature that was always there.