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

I was 11 years old and the first program i created was a simple quiz game using batch script.
😆😆

At 12 I got my first book on programming, at 13 I got my hands on a real computer for the first time, at 14 I got my first money for programming. :)

9 years young. HotBot was a search engine that offered free web pages. This was when Lycos and Earthlink were around and you had your Compaq Presario computer that you bought from The Wiz or Circuit City. I used to learn how to do html at funkychickens.com or lissaexplains.com. PHP3 was a thing and it was awful. We're at PHP 7 now.

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 😬

I was 12 years old, trying out a lot of CMS'es(PHP-fusion was my first one). Just babbled with HTML/CSS/PHP for some years, until i saw the movie The Social Network. It wanted me to make my own social network, so i did. It was quite awesome, i had like 60+ users and it was fun! When i look back on the sourcecode, i realize how much far i've gone. Time flies.

I started when I was was 34, year ago :)
My first program was video Downloader
I used python and gui was tkinter, python build in package

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 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 was ~20-21yo at the end of the '90s. My very first approach to programming happened when I discovered that it was possible to modify mIRC through scripting. I didn't own a PC, I was using a Windows 9x box at home. My goal was to learn Unix and Linux, so I've installed a RedHat on a "disk image hosted on Windows", and booted through floppy-disk.

I was learning programming for the first time with mIRC and I've found it exciting, however 1) I wasn't interested in Windows ecosystem at all and 2) unfortunately mIRC scripting wasn't usable outside mIRC itself.

After some days, I picked K&R and started learning C, then TCL/Tk, then Python (because even if Perl had that lovely C-like syntax, I considered it unreadable :-P), and bash, and PHP and many others for the last 20 years.

Good memories! ;-)

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 was around 13 and my first "project" was the hangman game in batch 😂

About 7, started with "guess a number between 0 and 100" then copied shitloads of BASIC games with line numbers in front of the lines. That was the real shit and I'm happy to see so many people agreeing :)

photo gallery in html 3.0 @ 9yo

I first learned to program in Atari BASIC on an Atari 400 in the early 80s. My first real BASIC project was something that added DOS commands to BASIC which I submitted to ANALOG Magazine (it was rejected). I also made a few simple games. I moved on to the Atari ST when I went to college and coded in Pascal and C.

My first project I ever publicly released was JumpSTART written in Personal Pascal for the Atari ST. I've just recently put the original Pascal source on GitHub.

github.com/paullefebvre/JumpSTART-...

I was 13 or 14 and my uncle gave me a book on C++ and using that book I made a small application to lock files behind a small password protected and age protected menu. (I was the oldest and only I was allowed to see these cool Linux distro pictures I found!)

Besides that I made a small application to write to text files instead of using Notepad because it was cool to me back then.

I don't know if you would call that a "project" really but that's my first memory of anything that felt like a complete product for me.