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Discussion on: How long have you been programming?

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Lowell Hamilton

I was 10 or so, had my shiny new IBM PCjr, DOS2.1, and the BASIC cartridge in the slot. I set out to build a game like MS Adventure (xyzzy!) ... got fed up and quit. A couple years later I found that the back of Sky and Telescope magazine had a BASIC program in the back of most issues and my library had every issue .... so I re-typed all of those and learned a ton.

I wrote some BBS door games in high school but never really "got" it, and decided on a different career.

I graduated high school and didn't do much until I started doing Linux SysAdmin jobs instead of college. I learned PERL to automate most of my tasks and started writing website form handlers and such, and eventually larger apps.

I STILL do PERL as the only dev maintaining/improving 2 large apps driving $50 million in revenue that I wrote in 2008 and a frontend written in ... wait for it ... prototype.js.

No future in that though and I cannot find good PERL devs to help/replace me, so I am re-tooling my brain to a fullstack JS developer and I am re-writing the app in Node and React (after a year of fighting with the company to approve it).

I feel like this is a fresh start and I feel like have only been programming for 6-months now, even though I have been at it for 30 years and employed as a dev for 20 years.