What made you want to become a dev?

I walked into a computer science classroom five years ago not knowing what code was. I had no context on how computers worked, how programming worked, or even what a programming language was. I quickly fell in love with writing Python, I thought it was awesome how I could build something useful and run it on my computer!

I re-fell in love with programming when I learned webdev with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. I could build webpages that were fully interactive relatively easily!

To quote the amazing Sandi Metz:

Those of us whose work is to write software are incredibly lucky. Building software is a guiltless pleasure because we get to use our creative energy to get things done. We have arranged our lives to have it both ways; we can enjoy the pure act of writing code in sure knowledge that the code we write has use. We produce things that matter. We are modern craftspeople, building structures that make up present-day reality, and no less than bricklayers or bridge builders, we take justifiable pride in our accomplishments.

This all programmers share, from the most enthusiastic newbie to the apparently jaded elder, whether working at the lightest weight Internet startup or the most staid, long-entrenched enterprise. We want to do our best work. We want our work to have meaning. We want to have fun along the way.

When I was in college in 1978 a friend of mine, a math major, asked me to go with him to take a look at a 'microcomputer' that had just arrived in the math department's computer lab, something called an "Apple II". They had it setup on a table sitting in between a couple of teletype machines and IBM punchcard machines. The guy in charge of the lab showed us an Apple BASIC program he had written that played some simple game. I signed up to take Computer Science 101 the next quarter so that I could learn how to do that.

I took a few twists and turns along the way, including a stint in the military followed by pursuing an MBA, before I went into programming as a career about 10 years later.

I'm currently 18 years old. Back in 2012, I was 13 years old and I was a Club Penguin player since 2009. In Club Penguin, there were some special penguins (managed by administrators) with the ability to give backgrounds and stamps to other penguins if they hung around together, so during parties people used to look for them everywhere.

Since we were bloggers, we had an image in our blogs with the location of the "special penguin", and that image was updated with a simple form in PHP. I wanted to build something better than that, so I built TrackYourPenguin. The system logged every update, allowed you to upload the images, have different themes, tweet the location of the "special penguin", and more, and it was easy to install (like WordPress, you didn't need to know about programming).

Also, just like in WordPress, I learned to add a button to update the entire system once there was a new update available. Many people enjoyed it, since it was the most complete system and they didn't need to know about coding. It was the project that taught me the most when I was a simple beginner.

Video games

For me, I got my first laptop in 6th grade and found Applescript. I asked my dad what I could do with it, and he said pretty much everything. And with all that power at my fingertips, the first thing I did was make my computer say "fart". That's when I knew this was what I wanted to do :)

Games. It was my enjoyment of playing computer games which got me interested in computers and considering it as a career option.

I remember first learning to program in Q Basic in the early-to-mid 90's by borrowing books from the local library and copying the code listings to make little games such as a racing car game where the car was a hash character with a colon character each side for the wheels and the sides of the track were vertical pipes.

Of course much of the fun was figuring out how they worked, altering these programs to see what affect the changes had, as well as adding additional features.

When it came time to go to Uni there were no game development courses that I could find in my country, so I chose a more general "Business Computing" course where I discovered web development. The mixture of coding logic and visual creativity strongly appealed, and still does appeal, to me.

I signed up for the free 14 days trial at Treehouse. I started with the Web development track and worked through the HTML and CSS stuff. After a week or so, my first website was out there on the web. The website had nothing special, an about page and a homepage. But I made it, all me, and it was an unbelievable feeling. From that point I was just curious to know what was possible with programming. And here I am :)

For me it was when I was in high school and got into 3D modeling which led me down the road of game development. And then after that I just started to explore a million other avenues of programming and landed in web development after I realized just how powerful and limitless it can become. Once I decided I wanted to get into web I played around in a few different languages like ruby and php and eventually every thing clicked the most with JS. And I have been taking it from there.

When I was a kid, I dreamt of building a Robot, I had no idea where to start and no mentors, that is why I thought I need to go to CS college. I couldn't learn programming (or even how to simply use a PC) before I made it to the university for many reasons.

Two years ago, I graduated from CS college, didn't build a Robot or even know how to, but this time I know where to start :)

I had a similar experience. I was first introduced to programming in my first semester of College in 2007. My first programming language was "C", I didn't really like it much because I didn't see the importance of it, since most of the programs I wrote were console programs. It wasn't until the following semester I was introduced to Java and the first basic assignment was to build a simple GUI with a button component. When the button is pressed it displays "hello world". After I compiled and executed the application I was blown away. I was like "Wow I made this!?!?" from then on my interest in programming skyrocketed and loved it ever since then and I knew I had found my passion. Fast forward 10 years later and I'm working as a Software Engineer and I love it!