What made you want to become a dev?

I always tot of websites and web applications as mistries beyond my imagination (lol), until the day a friend shared with me a book 'an intro to HTML and css'. Writing a simple hello world program and running it on my browser....Mehn that changed everything for me, I so much then desired to join the misterious gang of developers

Wanted to make a MCEdit plugin, got carried away. Never ended up making my plugin :P

I decided to become a developer when I was 23 years old and realized that my life was heading nowhere, had no aspirations, and I had been working as a call center agent for over 5 years.

It has been difficult, and even through I don't work as a developer yet, I know that the hard work will pay off, and most important, I have a goal and a reason to wake up and work.

This post has been up for almost 2 weeks now! I still can't believe I'm getting responses!

It's been a pleasure hearing about everyone's journey.

I think the most interesting thing to see is how different everyone's experiences have been. For some, we started out as non-technical people and we quickly grew into the role. For others, our passions grew from our hobbies.

No matter where we came from though, there's one thing that unites us:

Damn do we love code.

Keep it up y'all 😁

I was a mathematic student, when I came into my friend's room, he was learning VB 6. He was making a small program that adds two numbers and prints the result. I was amazed by it, I borrowed his book, and started learning to program and planned to create a card game. But I was stuck when things got complicated. I said to myself that I need a proper education for this, so I quit mathematic and joined computer science next year. Best decision I've ever made.

Firstly, I have enjoyed video games my whole life (I learned to read because of the Kings Quest games). So I've always been drawn to computers. Then, in junior high it was time to take career aptitude tests and I realized it was time to start considering what career I would like. My uncle is a programmer, so I saw that it provided well for his family, allowed him to be home, etc. I liked this, so I decided I'd check it out. I struggled through the first couple years of college, because I felt like I couldn't do anything real. I could write command line apps, plunk out a few classes in java, but that was it. Then, in one semester, I took databases, html and python, and that is when it all clicked. I could write a web page, that talked to a server, which stored things in a database. Suddenly, the internet wasn't magic, but just servers and databases. I felt so empowered, I've been hooked since.

The first the I came in touch with coding was around 4 years ago in school. Here, we developed a calculator with Pascal. At this moment my interest awoke in coding but I wasn't really fascinated by it. One year later I made a two week internship at a company that creates shopping systems.

My task was to work on a dashboard with Node.js on the backend. At this time I had no idea of HTML, CSS or JS. So in the first days I just started to learn the basic stuff before I took a deeper look at Node.js.

At the end of my internship, I created a dashboard with some cool features like a pinboard and so on. For sure, it was not perfect and it had many bugs but nevertheless I loved it. During this time I really 'fell in love' with coding and I realized that this is what I want to do in future.

I was faszinated by the result and what I've learnt in these two weeks. Moreover, I realized the endless possibilities you have with coding. It was something like a completley new world to me.

So I kept working on it at home during my schooldays and tried out more and more.

Today, I can say quite sure that this internship was the trigger for my decision to become a developer.

It mainly links being to me wanting to know how things worked. When I was a kid I'd be taking apart anything I could find to see how it would work on the inside. Including my family's computer. Which I couldn't fix. Once i learned about hardware I got interested in what was being used to make the interfaces and software we see possible. So I started searching around and messed with some batch scripts. From there it just sort of took off.

Same reason I enjoy videogames. "See that mountain? You can climb it." Except with programming you can do more than climb the mountain: You can shape the mountain, cap it with snow, place every bush and boulder on the path up. You can make that mountain your mountain. And in this age, you can show it, this miniature world, to the whole of the real world.

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.

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 spent my first two semesters of college still deciding what to do. I liked messing around on the computer (just games and Internet browsing), so I kinda wanted to see if there was anything I would enjoy doing that actually involved the inner workings of a computer. Still not sure exactly where I decided that or why... But I was hooked a few weeks into my first intro to programming class. This was in large part because of my professor, who is the type of man that can see when a student is really starting to understand and enjoy coding and help build your enthusiasm. After this first class, which taught the basics of coding with JS, I took almost every programming class I could find between the Info Tech and Computer Science departments. I spent a lot of time with Java and C++ for a couple years before getting a web dev internship (which has turned into a great salaried position) and finding it to be my strongest passion as far as coding goes. So I'm still not entirely sure what made me want to look into programming, but the thrill of seeing something work and knowing I wrote the code behind it, and the fun I have making that happen, have been enough to keep me going for four years now, with no plans to stop anytime soon.

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 :)

To be honest, I got into this because it was such an "in" thing. At first, I really thought this was a gateway pass to a good career, meaning it was well paid and highly regarded (even if it wasn't like other certified courses like being a Doctor or Lawyer).

I got into coding bootcamp with that goal in mind: for a well paying job that looked "cool".

So I went to class in the bootcamp, did my work, tried my best, and asked and sometimes not ask. Sometimes, I was stuck in a problem but I would hesitate in asking, and then my teacher come up right behind me and point out the missing piece in my code. Or he would suddenly explain the javascript code I found in StackOverflow, but couldn't understand.

Same goes for my first ever boss. He founded a small company here in the Philippines and it's only us 6 employees working, so he's very hands-on. He teaches us everything he can. He encourages us to ask when we're stuck. And he gives us code reviews and tips whenever he has the time.

So to conclude, maybe I didn't have any code-defining moment. But I feel so blessed to be around people who teach me and pass their knowledge to me. It feels good to learn. And like how Ali Spittel quote Sandi Metz: "we can enjoy the pure act of writing code in sure knowledge that the code we write has use."

Well, almost five years before, I bought a computer and I have finally got internet access in my own house, then all the time since I was a kid I wanted to make videogames. My computing teacher told me a few years before that C++ language was easy, and the same day that the internet was installed I put in google "programming languages for make videogames", and C++ appeared again other languages were there too like C# VisualBasic.NET but, C++ convinced me, I dowloaded Dev C++ and two hours after I've written my first Hello world. I have to say that my first C++ Teacher was Jesus Conde, his youtube channel still active 'till today.

Today I work as a Junior Programmer, well Im not making videogames yet but I'm still working on it ;)