!rant

How did you all get into development? I've heard some pretty non-linear career trajectories from friends of mine, but I'm not sure if that's normative for developers as a whole. Your thoughts?

I'm a BI Developer that Develops random stuff in spare time but I went from:

Retail Shop -> Bank -> Administrator in insurance (changing addresses) -> BI Developer, and since Dec 5, Senior BI Developer / Team Leader

I started scripting when I was 13 for a game called Armagetron Advanced. It was all in php and I honestly had no clue what the language was really used for. I then started doing allot of hosting for guilds and clans kine and really built up some web back end and Linux admin skills. I jumped I to the mobile scene when I started working at Walmart and developed an app to look up UPC data for Walmart.com catalog items. I finished an associate's degree in programming 2 weeks ago and just landed a job as a developer in a big coop.

Phisics -> Maths -> Matematica and R -> C++ ( yeah I can calculate even faster!)

@MaLiN2223 Me too! I'm in from astronomy/math to scipy to python to C++. Crazy how leaky that physics pipe is.

Started scripting in my early teens, developed a few small side projects, little bit of networking, then started studying chemistry, flunked out 15 credit points away from my bachelor's, with a bachelor thesis already written and decided to study cs because I lost the chance to study my passion so I just wanted something, ideally something I already knew and the module catalog looked easy enough.
Since money was tight I took a job as software tester and someday my boss asked if I'd try automating some tests. Since I love (and needed) new challenges I tried, it worked and the projects got bigger. Now I'm pretty much a part time employee instead of 'just another student' and as much as I despise non theoretical CS, I love working as a programmer.

My path:

Oil Painter -> College Instructor -> Cartoon writer -> Web Designer -> Web developer

Retail -> Chef -> Food Distributor -> Professional Golfer -> IOS Developer

Had some other smaller jobs and schooling mixed in, those are the highlights though. Now I'm working on moving into Data Science.

A friend taught me HTML and I loved it, at school they taught me c++ and loved it more, from there it was an straight path to geekness

Welcome btw

@jpichardo thanks!

@starless Welcome to devrant, hope you like it

I'm passionate about computers, video games etc. That interest towards technology got me into the software development sector.. i love learning new things. so feels good being a dev

Clerical Assistant->Data Entry while I was studying for an associate IT degree part time then moved unto a Computer Science degree. I'd rather self-teach and learn through practical means than obtain a Masters.

Out of interest, passion, and simply because I suck at every thing else, I choose it.
And oh, I really enjoy doing that, ask me to read some book not related to these, I will probably end up doing stuff on my phone or PC :p.