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Vanessa Telles
Vanessa Telles

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Happy Programmers' Day 🎉🎉

Today is September 13, also known as the 256th day of the year.

The number 256 was chosen because it is the number of distinct values that can be represented with 1 byte 🤓

Happy day to us! 👩‍💻 👨‍💻

Being a dev is not easy, you have to work hard and keep learning stuff forever, but in the end, it is fun and I cannot see myself being anything else!

Not long ago I made a post talking about my first experience ever with coding (which was kind of...unusual).

So let in the comments, how did you get into tech?

Top comments (4)

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Brian B.

I was a grade schooler when I found out the electric typewriter at the library had a version of BASIC in the settings. It couldn't do much, but it got my first output printed to a 32 character width screen. It wasn't long before I was begging for a computer.

My pops took me to Best Buy to pick out a 'computer game' and I ended up leaving with a Borland C compiler and book. The rest was history. Hard to believe that was decades ago...

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Vanessa Telles

That's so cool! I watched some videos about electric typewriters some time ago but I've never seen one in real life.

It is strange indeed to look back and see how much progress we had in a small amount of time with tech and still, there is so much more to do 💪🖥️

Thank you for sharing your story 🤓

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Mark Long

Way back in the very early 80s, when I was about 8 years old, I got a 150-in-1 electronics kit from Radio Shack for Christmas. Exploring circuitry on that little box with its spring and wire connectors completely jump started my interest in electronics. Within a year, I had discovered the nascent home computer world, and talked my parents into getting me a Commodore VIC-20. On that I started to learn programming in BASIC, and a true passion was born. As I subsequently progressed through an Apple 2e, a Commodore Amiga 500, and then a blur of PCs (DOS, Windows, Linux, you name it...) and Macs, I picked up more and more skills, techniques, languages (oh so many), and operating systems. I have journeyed on a lifelong process of learning and creating. I'm truly astounded that I've been fortunate enough to make a good living doing what I love.

(Incidentally, shouldn't this be day 255? I mean, any self-respecting programmer knows that any good ordinal list should be 0-based!)

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Vanessa Telles

You started very young! And at the base of all this, hardware! It's not really my thing, I still have nightmares about the electronics classes I took 😅

Since the 80s, technology has gone through several phases, it must be interesting to look back and reflect on how everything has changed, right?

Thank you for sharing your story with us 🤓

(you are right it should be 255, but I propose that we celebrate both the 255 and 256! 😆)