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Discussion on: What's your coding origin story?

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Matthew Daly

I'm just about old enough to have started out coding BASIC on an 8-bit home computer, but after that there was a long hiatus of nearly two decades when I didn't write a line of code.

Fast forward to 2006 and I was working for an insurance company in a customer service role. I'd bought a laptop with the vague notion of writing science fiction, but that petered out after a year or two. Instead I had a voucher for money off one of those Dummies books, so got one about Linux and started playing around with Ubuntu.

Within a few months I'd decided that web development was the field I really wanted to go into, so I started a correspondence course.

A few years later, I left the insurance company to start my first web dev job. That role didn't work out for a number or reasons, but the next role I took lasted over four years and saw me learning Django, Laravel and Phonegap, and working on some very varied and interesting projects.

My early fumblings with BASIC probably helped me out a bit as they gave me an early introduction to the principles of programming, even if I never got very far.