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Discussion on: How did you get into programming in the first place?

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Christian Semmler

In 6th grade of school we were given a TI Voyage 200 calculator. Since I've been bored most of the time while sitting around in lessons, I fiddled with it and found you could write programs on it in a language called TI-BASIC (a flavour of the BASIC programming language).

So I consumed the documentation of that language and wrote software that would automatically solve formulas we were given in math lessons (printing individual steps as well) so I had more time to play Tetris on it. I gained excellent grades with that and to the surprise of everyone around me, I was able to solve everything in a fraction of time others needed.

I was fond of playing video games as well, so after that I explored modding and hacking video games to adjust them to my wishes. I got into C, C++ and stuff like youtube.com/watch?v=x_vShp_YdjE happened.

At the age of 17 I got my first job software engineering job, developed a PHP framework for a local company. Joined a university to study computer science, got bored of it mid-way and dropped out, since then working in a small company of guys around my age creating all kinds of software for companies and startups in our country. Love it!