Ask HN: Why did you start programming? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why did you start programming?

10 pointspeter_l_downs23 comments

I'd love to hear why you started programming. It would be especially interesting to see how many people had similar reasons. Me? I was inspired by a Foxtrot cartoon.

View on HN

I started out writing perl scripts to download porn. Clicking through to every page of various free galleries and manually saving things was hard work, so I figured there had to be some way to make the computer do that for me.

Still makes me proud just thinking about it.

The best thing I heard today :)

Ha, that's awesome, well done.

A long time ago when Apple was trying to get into the schools, I was in a typing class. Being a shy kid, I didn't get a typewriter in the middle of the class. I got the Apple ][ in the corner to practice typing with. My sister was in high school and was learning typing as well. But her advance class had sequences like 3;4o2.14%. When she finished, it came out to be a picture of something. We now know them as ASCII art. Through my poking around, I learn that I can write for loops on the computer, so instead of typing 10 As, 10 Bs,...I wrote a loop to output the lines. A little more poking around I was outputting the sequences from my sister class and had pictures of things on my screen. That was cool! And the rest, as they say, was history.

At my job in the early eighties we had to maintain paper forms of engineering data, and when one value would change due to external reasons, we had to update all the fields by writing the forms over or with whiteout. I hated that, so I taught myself to program the department's mini-computer. Discovered I liked that more than my job, so I quit and went to school.

I had to solve a problem with which nobody would/could help me while working at the university help desk. I coded up my own little solution in php (3) and MySql (3). Yeah. I was one of those.

I think the hardest part of getting started as a programmer is finding that first paycheck which rewards your work as a coder. If you're serious about building your skills, it can definitely be done! A CS degree can absolutely help get you more money. (And introduce you to different methods of organizing your work).

All that matters is your attitude and your personal ethics. If those are in order, it doesn't matter how you get started.

Back when I had my first computer (an 8 bit micro called an Amstrad - around the time of the C64 and Vic20) computer magazines used to publish games as entire listings in BASIC ... so by definition if you wanted to play their 'published' game then you had to type the thing in on your computer, debug it and run it (and then save it to a cassette tape for replay later) ... This got me hooked and I went on to develop my own small games, and also a musical (piano keyboard) application when I was 14 yrs old.

I wanted to build something that people would love, so I thought I'd startup a business. I realized almost immediately that the grotesque "find a tech co-founder" mating dance wasn't for me, and decided to teach myself to code. Note to people looking for "tech co-founders" and refusing to teach themselves the basics: It wasn't all that freaking hard, people - Jeez.

I was frustrated by the low quality of programs I was forced to use regularly and thought I could do better.

I created a menu based text adventure game about the colonists from England who sailed to America in the 1600s for my history class in middle school. It was created in the basic language built into the TI-83+ calculator. My teacher was extremely impressed and I was awarded an A+.

I always wanted to do it, but my dad didn't want me to. He thought that engineers would only be needed to maintain software in the future (this was the mid to late 90's). I eventually took a 100 level CS course as a junior and loved programming ever since.

I wanted to create my own website.

Same here.. then it got out of control and now it's my career.

I grew up playing playing the first MMORPGs where each level or skill took hours upon hours of repetitive button mashing. Hence, I learned to "macro," and my automation programs gradually grew more and more advanced.

I got my first computer at 12 and progressed from building, to tinkering with windows settings to development.

I wanted to build the Terminator so I decided to start learning programming.

How far has that project come?

Two words: Video Games

It's fun

Honestly, I just wanted to see what the hype was all about, then see if I could do it. I got a C++ book from a friend and initially looking at the book I ran the other direction. I was in my second year in college then. Then about my third yr in college I decided I would go for change my degree from CIS to B.S Software Engineering. Really to see if I could do it at first, I thought if I could this would streamline me into project management or something of that nature since I wanted to be in tech but not a dev.. Well after taking a few courses in C, javascript, I took Java and I sucked at it at first. Then something weird happen in my Advanced Java 2 class, I got code high one day.(I was working on a calculation project). This lead to a ever-ending search for that feeling over and over again... So I ended up taking the rest of my OO classes including VB and C++ and I decided code high was the coolest thing in the world.. So I decided I would pursue "code high" as career which is dev.. Now I code for a living and I am addicted to dev and sys stuff... I'm that which I said I would never be!! Honestly I just love building things and breaking things...and building them again.

When I left school I went to work for a RnD organization and was offered the same job (research assistant) in two departments one was math modeling and one was in the solids transport section

I knew some one from school who was in this section and having to crawl inside of of the pneumatic pipeline transport test rig for 1/2 a mile to unstick a stuck capsule didn't sound fun.

So I chose math modeling.

It was around 1996. My brother had a friend who gave us a phone call and say: "hey my 3D engine is lagging on my computer, may I come and test on yours?" Sure... He came and start running this 3D engine: http://fredbrach.posterous.com/engine4

It was so fast, I fell in love and started programming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com