How did you get into programming?

Technically my interest started with tweaking MySpace profile themes. I didn't really understand what I was doing at the time, but there were parts of the code that seemed fairly easy to figure out.

If course now I know it was just HTML and inline CSS.

I also wish I had actually dived into learning it then, but I was more interested in my video games at the time. 🙃

I guess my second time messing with CSS was a few years later when I was part of Gaia Online. I still didn't get deep into it, but I figured out enough to tweak the styles of my profile a little bit.

I remember how impressed I was with some other users who seemed to physically restructure their profiles though. Each profile had certain boxes on them and some custom content boxes you could add. Some of the other users made all of those boxes together look like things like small houses with windows and doors that would open on hover, or other creative ideas. Lots of background images to complete the look of course. 😅

I have always been fasinated with tech since I first played Pokemon on my brothers purple Gameboy before I could even read 😄
With 13 I got into a higher technical school and had coding, database management and networking lesson for 5 years, and now - 4 years later - I still love what I do 🥰

As the story I listed on my website goes, and as it so went all those years ago...

I was like seven or eight and I had received a copy of Minecraft (now Minecraft: Java Edition) and the most recent version was like 1.8 or something.
I enjoyed the game, but one day I was snooping around in File Explorer and had navigated to the Minecraft folder (%appdata%\.minecraft).
I just kind of wanted to investigate so I opened random files, and the one that struck me was a Java Archive (.jar ) file.
As expected by most people except me at the time, it was full of nothing, complete rubbish-text. But, that made me curious.
I learned about executable files and binary and eventually madey way to actually learning how to code.
I started actually programming when I was around eleven. I can't remember.

I start playing with TI-82, doing small games and stuff. I end up programming a small 3D engine displaying tetrahedrons in wireframe. It was during the old ps1 era, and I was passionate about 3D real time rendering.

Then I get an old laptop with a 486-DX2 potato processor and developed a 3D engine in QBasic. It supported ZBuffer, shadows, texturing and Bump mapping, and took a few minutes to render a single frame 🤣

I then entered University, where I truly learned programming and 3D rendering.

I finally worked nearly 10 years on OpenInventor 3D engine.

Yes, I'm really into 3D 😁

Me, well, I have an older sister who used to be an IT student but was not able to finish it becuase of some problems. She has a lot of books that are not being used, with curiusity I opened some of those books. The book I opened was about C++, As I am reading it, its really hard to understand it since I really dont know about it.

But because of curiutisty and because I like to use and play computer games, I took IT as my course during college.

As we are learning, it was easy for me to understand what we are learning because of the book I red. It was an awesome experience.

My high school math teacher introduced me to it, months before graduation. Even though math was not my favorite subject lol, I was persistent at solving problems. I’m assuming that’s why he thought programming would be a good fit for me, turns out he was right. 😁

He had me try Java (that’s what he was working on) I believe on Codecademy. I was hooked from there. I discovered web development on Codecademy, and found interest in that specifically. I never turned back after that, I knew that’s what I wanted to work on after I graduated 🙏.

This was a life saver for me because I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do with my life before hand. So..thank you Sean 🙏😌(even though he probably will never see this lol)

I had interests in computers since very young, but I mainly got into programming from Junior-hi (that is from 7th to 9th grades) which had a special program where students are allowed to come up with their own "research theme" and work on it for a semester every year. There were cases of learning to code was the theme, so I chose it as my theme; that was where it all took off.

Our father brought an discarded industrial control computer (far less powerful than today's embedded devices) home for us when we were 8 to play with. It had a dual line 8 char 7-segment display, 3 8 bit registers, a rather simple reduced instruction set and a minimal r/w non-volatile memory, less than 1kb, if I recall correctly. We taught it connect-4. Later, we got a Schneider Joyce and a few years after, an Amstrad PC10. That's how I got into programming.

Like a lot of people, it was gaming for me too. I played a lot of games as a kid, and looked up to game developers, but was too lazy to try to learn programming... until one day.

I think it was summer vacation after 8th grade, I started writing scripts for Gary's Mod to impress my friends. It took forever and they were really bad, but I got better, branched out into making Second Life scripts too, took an online Java class in school, read a book on PHP, and just kept going from there.

Somewhat by accident. Taught myself how to program on an HP 2000 minicomputer, which I dialed into using a Teletype Model 33 and a 110 baud acoustic coupler modem. I had the HP BASIC reference card, and started modifying Oregon Trail. (I didn't realize, at the time, that the copy of Oregon Trail was the one shared by everyone on that TIES timeshare computer.)

Heartfelt gratitude to Bill Heinemann, Don Rawitsch, and Paul Dillenberger. Never met them, but I was a direct beneficiary of their endeavor.

Later that same year, I started playing D&D. If not for that initial experience programming, I may have wound up a proprietor of a friendly local game store. Which wouldn't have been bad, either, but is a much more competitive market.

In my country, young people playing computer game a lot. And because they can seat in front of computer for a long times.
So.......... they decide to learn programming by goin to university....
And a lot of them quit afterward...
I'm the lucky one still get a job.

For a long time, my dad had wanted me to get into programming (I was like 10 when he started to talk about it.) I got really bored during quarantine in 2020, so I started to learn JavaScript. I didn't really have anything I wanted to build, just wanted to experiment and have fun.

I cannot tell nothing about programming because I do not know it and in realistic never tried. I can tell about html+css and the moment I started it was just html. I stayed a lot with MS Frontpage (I do believe it was Frontpage 2003) for more than 7-8 years. I moved it when it started to be completely outdated with the code and just tried to type in Notepad. Remember the time when lot of websites have the badge "Made with Notepad" means no any visual editor is used.

Durinig quarentine (early 2020), I got pretty bored and just really wanted to learn something new. I still remember my first site, where I used padding to center things 🤦‍♂️. And yes, HTML was my first "language" (pls don't get annoyed by that), I learnt CSS in the weirdest way. Back I used the style tag to style things, and I didn't even know that CSS exsisted. When I did some research and decided to "start" learning CSS I realized that I already knew it!

Once, I met this guy who was programming and we played in same band. He was so proud of being a programmer and always said “you don’t know whats array?” Or something like that. It made me sick, his arrogance, so I started studying Java and databases, then went to JS etc. and thats how I get this isn’t so tough