Ask HN: What were you doing when you were 20?

I was studying at the UNSW - attended John Lions' Operating System course and met Ken Thompson during his sabbatical visit :) Most of my time was spent hacking UNIX/Networking at Uni, C/C++ and 68000 Assembly on the Amiga at home (loved Fred Fish and Matt Dillon's work). Hacking hardware peripherals designed for other computers to make them work on the Amiga. Also wrote my first C compiler and LISP interpreter then. Discovered TeX/LaTeX and used them for my thesis during my final engineering year later. Discovered magazines such as DDJ, BYTE and journals such as Comms of the ACM, IEEE Transactions, etc. and spent way too much time on level 6 and 7 of the Uni library reading them. Worked at the CSIRO during semester break and wrote an image analysis library in C and displaying in X-Window. Dreamed about having my own Tektronix oscilloscope and logic analyser :)

I graduated from college at 20 and became a tech investment banker. In hindsight, it was a terrible decision but I simply didn't know any better. Tech crashed in 2001 so a lot of my engineering friends went into finance and I simply followed them.

I learned two really valuable lessons from the experience: one, if you don't build your dream then someone else will hire you to help them build theirs; and two, I learned what really mattered in life after I lost it all from working all the time. Hint, it's not money or fame.

1) Slept in college. 2) Learnt programming most of the nights. 3) Built few apps. 4) Started writing open source code. 5) Got hired by bunch of startups and freelanced. 6) Taught some programming to my friends. 7) Tried. 8) Failed. 9) Tried. 10) Failed.

Two things that you need to experience in your 20 is "Trying and Failing". It will teach you the lessons that you need for rest of your life.

Have a great Twenty , Opportunities are Plenty.

I was being married, writing poetry and discovering the bohemian life. Oh yeah also scholarship student at local college, involved with running the mac lab in the humanities department, and generally making a nuisance of myself.

I'm 20 for a few more months. I've been working in startups for the last 2 and a bit years. I moved to London and I'm exaggerating slightly, but it seems as if work is all I do sometimes.

Aged 20 was just about the time I dropped out of university for illness related reasons.

At that time I was mostly doing standard UK student things: working as DJ for fun, getting drunk far too much, and having sex with interesting people.

Shortly after becoming a non-student I became a computer programmer, although the other activities were a large part of my life for the next 10 years or so.

I spearheaded the first Internet dept of a major Silicon Alley Agency. I was in grad school (ITP) and saw a job post for someone who knew "HTML" .. i told them I did only having picked it up days before. * it was 1.0. -- this was late 90's. NYC was a great place to be in tech then. Wet n Wild!

I would become a tech NOMAD while you have the freedom. It will be the best memories of your life. peep http://nomadlist.com for ideas. good luck!

Hey, I'm turning 20 in August, good idea on this post.

I was photographing my own hallucinations. When the visions didnt turn up in the prints I knew it was due to my inexperience as a photographer, so I bought some books on professional and art photography, and learned to develop and print my own film.