How old have you been when you started programming and what was your first project?

I was about 8 in the early-to-mid 90s. My father subscribed to the Sky & Telescope astronomy magazine, and one issue published the code listing for a simple three-body gravitational simulation in BASIC, so one afternoon he and I copied it down and got it running. That was the first; other early hits include the obligatory mucking around in GORILLA.BAS, an abortive text adventure after the style of Colossal Cave, and trying to port simpler C listings for fractal generators into BASIC with some success -- I could grasp the program structure and translate the algorithms, but couldn't handle C's more complex toolchain and lack of a dead-simple PSET to plot a pixel.

Hum, it was in BASIC (not even on a proper computer, it was more like a big calculator). I was maybe about 10-11 years old.

All pick 2 random numbers between 0 and 10 and ask you what their product was, and checked if it was right.

Catch: you could only have one program at a time. If you want to make a new thing, erase everything first!.

I know WBB2, back then WoltLab's community was pretty much limited to the DACH region, I guess.

I actually started modding the lite version when I was around 11, together with two online friends I built quite the community around some kids' chatroom. :D

Then, when gaming clans boomed around here I switched to a certain CMS and I worked with designers to make templates (and later even addons) for it.

As a freshman in college, 1988, I found that the school I attended did not require the two years of foreign language I took, but instead wanted a class on computer (BASIC on DOS) literacy. So I took a remedial course my first semester.

I was a gamer and occasional DM at the time, so I wrote a tool to print off a page or so of random 1-6 numbers. And then I did it again, and got the same list of "random" numbers. Computers are deterministic and don't really understand random, so you must seed your random number generators. (Plus, for crypto, use the small remainders of key punching times or a webcam pointed at a lava lamp or something.)

I also developed code that would allow me to easily switch between 1-6 and 1-12 or 1-20 (because AD&D needed all available dice styles) but the GOTOs jumping in and out were frustrating and weird, making me understand why people prefer subroutines rather than GOTOs, which are "considered harmful".

I then didn't write another thing for something like seven years, while using computers constantly.

In 2012 I was a sophomore in high school taking trigonometry and I hated it. I had some games on my TI-84 graphing calculator and found I could view and edit the code. I think the language is TI BASIC or something like that. I ended up making a full fledged blackjack game that semester. I wish I still had the calculator because I'm sure the code was awful-- I had no concept of a for loop or any basic programming principles. All my variable names were single letters

I got sidetracked in math class when I was 14 figuring out how to program my TI-84. I played with that for a year or two before I wrote any code on a real computer.

My first projects were prank programs on other people’s calculators that returned wrong answers. The best one? Replacing the output of trig functions with random values. No one understood trig yet, so they didn’t know...

(I have since moved on to less dastardly deeds)

I started programming in 1976. I worked on a Model 33 Teletype dialed into an HP 2000 Timeshare System minicomputer, over a 110 baud acoustic coupler modem, which was part of the TIES system. The programming language was HP 2000A BASIC. The first program that I worked on (not that I created it, I added to it) was Oregon Trail. I was 10 years old, and would stay at school until 9pm every night until the janitors kicked me out to lock up.

I had a ZX-81 in the 80's, with BASIC and 1K RAM. My neighbor Simon and I used to type programs into it from magazines, one character at a time into that membrane keyboard. Then we'd save them to cassette tapes.

Later we added a 16k RAM extension. By that time, Simon was programming in hex, which he'd dictate and I'd type. I became the typist at that stage, awestruck how he'd come up with all these codes that were drawing lines, sprites etc.

While typing, you had to be careful not to bump the RAM extension pack, which plugged into the back of the ZX-81. If you bump it, you could break the plug's electrical contact, which would clear the RAM. Then you'd be back to square one, and have to start typing your program again. So we used lots of blu-tac around the RAM pack to lock it in place.

I built my first website in the 5th grade. I don't remember what it was about, but I fell in love with the process. Then over the years I built some websites and did some freelance work.

Then, at 21, I often used a language learning website and I didn't like it how the team treated the users and how slow they were to implement new features. I thought that I would manage to build such a platform for myself by myself. I knew I would fail, but I wanted to try. I knew nothing about web programming and what technology I needed, so I opened their vacancies and saw that they were hiring senior Django developers. This is how I learned about Django. Then I opened Django tutorial and started building. I finished the website in eight months, three months after I landed my first job as a Python backend developer.

I was 15 at that time. I used to chat on a mobile application called mig33 where people can join in a chat room and chat. There were some people who created some software that could log into multiple ids, join a room and flood them with a huge amount of messages! Because at that time mobiles were pretty weak (Talking about the j2me apps) most of the peoples' app will be hanged and crushed 😈They were the gods of those time.
So they used to sell that software and I basically had no money and I asked one for free, and got rejected badly. (There was lots of chat room drama involved).
So I decided that I will finally learn how to code and create my own version of that software. 🐸
That was the beginning, bought a visual basic 6 book from a book reseller. Learned how to code, shamelessly asked for help as much as I can and vollah created my own software 😬

When I was 15, I was very lucky to have a teacher for the high school "computers" course that, instead of word and excel, taught us how to program in BASIC. He even gave us some Computer Science knowledge (sorting algorithms and others).
We were so excited that we used to do extra programming classes in the afternoon so the teacher proposed to create a program to compute the D'Hondt method for allocating seats in the local election.
The election day we were present in the counting process taking samples and using them as inputs in our program. We even won a price for that project.
That was my first programming project.

I started programming around 17 in high school. My first program I built was a small maze type game in game maker. And then right after that I started working in rpg maker and built a bigger game demo. For a state wide game competition. And it pretty much took off from there.

I was about 13 or 14 years old. I used to go to Books-A-Million about once a month. One trip I saw the C++ for Dummies book and had my mom buy it for me. I only made one program in it and that was a F to C and C to F temperature converter. I didn't understand what I was doing so I stopped messing with programming. That is, until a year ago. Now I'm in Lambda School for computer science and web dev. But I did work as a FED fora company building out and Styling their React components only that company flopped 6 months before my contract ended.

I was about 10 or 11 when I was learning HTML and CSS to build my Neopet a Petpage. After that I branched off into Javascript and set up a page on Geocities, and moving over to game programming with a book called Game Programming for TEENS when I was 12. Because I'm a rebel at heart.

After that I taught myself some flash scripting, took a CS course sophomore year of college in Java, leading to AP CS. Went to college for CS (and then switched to the new game dev major). Got a job making branded Flash/Unity games, and then making CMS-backed websites.

I was 16. I had an idea to gift my dad a website for his birthday. I spend 3 months writing that website and never finished. I got hooked into web-development, and later on into programming over all. I love it and been doing it for 3 years now and it never gets boring. Hoping to get my degree and do my favorite thing for another 30 years or more :)