One day when I was about 8 years old my friend and I were in the library. We decided we wanted to try to make a baseball website because we both likes baseball (this was around 1998). We picked up a book on HTML and my dad took it out for us. My dad was also a programmer so he said he would help us learn. We went home that afternoon and made a little website!

I knew right then that I really enjoyed programming and creating things with code, but I realized I wanted to be a programmer in middle school and high school. One of my friends and I started building Flash games. To see if people were playing them, I added in a call to each game that hit a PHP script on our server. I'll never forget the days/weeks that one of our most popular games caused our sever to get hammered and our shared host said they were going to boot us.

It was an awesome feeling knowing people were enjoying these games that we worked really hard on, and that's one of the main reasons I always wanted to be coding/creating things that people enjoy using.

so I was at primary school and our homework was: "what do you want to do when you grow up". my dad took me around town for inspirations. that's when I saw that famous ad that led me to do IT.

At middle school they kept on banning the flash game sites so I made one my self but it was called something like mathhomework.somefreehost.com, the landing page looked like a homework site and all the flash games were called something like problem_1.swf. I use to sell logins to class mates at like £2.50.

one day my dad brings home an old blade server from work and a centos distro. we set it up in the garage of our hot Florida house and he gave me his old perl programming books and showed me a few things. I was 12 or 13. that summer I moved my bed to the garage and barely slept as I learned everything I could. I've never looked back.

I applied to be a pro gamer. Still unsure how I ended up being a programmer.

I changed the HTML of my school website to say 'MR. DAVIES SMELLS'. Having seen the ensuing havoc that I caused, I knew this was for me.

Starting days of C++ were like..

When I realized the .config files of GTA VC could be modified in a text editor. Policecar maxspeed=0, wheelsize=0, damagemultiplier=9999

I was in college studying stuff I couldn't care less about and had a job that was consuming me. A couple of colleagues and I then decided to open our own company. Four years of sleepless nights later, all colleagues left. I had lost touch with family and friends, had lost a girlfriend and had been left with all the company's debt to pay. Going back to my old career seemed like the only option, but I couldn't let me sabotage myself again. I sat my butt in front of my sister's computer and downloaded every coding class I could get my hands on. Getting used to sleep deprivation helped. Eventually I built my first app and landed my first freelance job. All hat in hand, I told this company I didn't have much experience and they told me they'd hire a senior developer as well. It was on a Sunday morning, at 4am, with the deadline breathing down our necks, that the senior developer had jumped ship and the company asked me if I could take over the project. That moment I realised it's all about being competent. That moment I knew I could do this.

When I thought I hacked Facebook.

I somehow managed to "inspect element" and changed a couple of the words on the page. I reloaded the page and all my work was gone... I tried it again and again then googled how to hack. I then learned how to make batch scripts. the rest is history.

Around 2009 or earlier, I began the long grueling process of creating my own batch AI (yes batch as in Windows Batch , kill me for not knowing there were better languages around). Looking back at it, it is THE messiest thing I've ever created. Mostly because of how many unnecessary files were created to make the entire thing work. However, I’m still proud of it to this day because of the dedication I had put into creating the entire thing.

I would create diagrams on the mirrors in my room; of course I would be scolded for this. But I really couldn't stop thinking about my program and working through the entire thing.

I would scribble and type whenever I had the chance, trying to create the functions that would allow the thing to talk back to me. Finally, when it opened its eyes and spoke its first words I quickly started creating the functions that would allow it to learn new inputs. Over time and with some elbow grease I was able to polish it up to my liking.

The entire program branched off some of my more earlier programs in batch, they mostly ranged from the medial to the crazy; i.e. turning my computer on and off at certain times of the day, and multithreaded migration of files to new disks

It's not as sophisticated as other AI progrmas that were being made at the time, but at the age of 16 and with no experience in real programming at all, I'd say it was my first stepping stone towards more sophisticated programs, and ultimately, my decision to enter into Computer Science at all.

2008: Made my new PC go Blue Screen within 3 months. Knew I wanted to do "something with computers".

2016: CS Major. ✌(◕‿-)✌

It was the year 2000, when IE was considered awesome. The internet then was slow and expensive and I had a quota about half an hour a day for dial up.

I discovered that I could view the source code of any page and while it looked rather cryptic I slowly started to understand how it worked. After months of tinkering in Notepad, I was able to write some html and JavaScript. No books, no online tutorials, just pure act of curiosity and a sense of adventure.

How to write JavaScript properly had to wait for another decade after an engineering degree, a dozen other languages, and new browser. But those tinkering days were what got me into coding.

I starten when I was 12 years old. I got bullied and got interested in computers. One day I crashed my dads computer and he reinstalled it. After that my dad made two accounts. The regular user (my account) and the Administrator user (my dads account). He also changed the language from Dutch to English. Gladly I could still use the computer by looking at the icons :')

Everytime I needed something installed I had to ask my dad first (for games mostly because there was no cable internet at that time). Then I noticed the other user account while looking over my dads shoulders. So I tried to guess the password and found out the password was the same as the label next to the password field "password".

At that point my interest in hacking had grown. So when we finally got cable internet and my own computer (the old one) MSN Messenger came around. I installed lots of stuff like flooders etc. Nobody I knew could do this and people always said; he is a hacker. Although it is not.

I learned about IP-address because we sometimes had trouble with the internet. So when my dad wasn't home he said to me. Click on this (command prompt) and type in; ipcondig /all. If you don't see an IP-address you should type in; ipconfig /renew.

Thats when I learned that every computer has a unique address and I started fooling around with hacking tools I found on internet (like; Subseven).

When I got older I had a new friend and fooled around with the hacking tools on his computer. Untill one day I went by my friend and he said; my neighbor just bought my old computer. The best part was that he didn't reinstall it. So we asked him to give us the "weird code on the website" his IP-Address and Subseven connected. It was awesome :'). (Windows firewall was not around back then and routers weren't as popular or needed)

At home I started looking up more hacking stuff and found a guide. I still remember it was a white page with only black letters like a text file. It said sometime like; To be a hacker you first need to understand programming. The website recommended Visual Basic 6 for beginners. I asked my parents to buy me a book about it and I started reading in the holliday.

It was hard for me but I really wanted to hack MSN accounts. When I got older I just played around and copy -> pasted code. I made my own MSN flooders and I noticed hacking isn't easy.

I kept programming and learned and learned. When I was 16/17 I started an education in programming. We learned C# and OOP (altho I hated OOP at first). I build my own hacking tool like "Subseven" and thats when I understood you need a "server" and "client" for a successful connection.

I quit the hacking because it was getting to difficult and after another education I'm now a fulltime back-end developer in C#.

That's my story in short :)

I was about 17 years old had tried wood & metal craftsmanship but never liked it, so I spoke with a counsellor and mentioned I like computers as I play a lot of games.

That counsellor laughed at me ( a shut in that rarely says anything ) and told me I'm too stupid..

Since then, I have scored almost pure top grades without any particular job goal.
But eventually met a good friend who wanted to be a Web developer, so I simply followed the same path and kept on reaping top grades lol.. :)

As Ana says in overwatch, "Never stop fighting for what you believe in."

One year for Christmas, my dad got me an old tower and installed Windows 98 on it. He also got two old-school PCI WiFi cards so that my "new" computer could access the Internet via his.

I started learning basic web development. I would convince my mom (an English teacher) to buy me books on programming all the time when she was getting her own books at the store.

Eventually, I got a book on Blitz Basic and started making my own video games.

Then GameMaker, Java, C/C++, and more web development and design happened until all the sudden, out of nowhere, I'm a computer scientist 😁

It's crazy how much we owe to our parents. And neither us nor them even realized what they were doing at the time!

When I was 13 yrs old, I played Counter strike. One day by chance, I went into its program files folder and started looking through the files. There I found a bots.db which I opened on Notepad++. I found out that unlike many other files, it had un-garbled text. So I studied its contents and soon realized that it contained bot profiles. I edited skill levels of some of them and opened the game. To my delight, the bot's skill did change. It was so awesome, I can now complete the missions I was stuck in. That was the moment I had first wanted to go into Software Development field but I only started to code 4 years later.

i was graphic designer but couldn't find a reliable frontend dev to implement stuff for my clients. So i decided to learn. Then i found fun in js, later on angular. Then i found node.js and this was FUN! so im a backend dev for quite a while now :-)

1986. Commodore 64 computer. First program in assembler to move cursor on screen. I will never forget that day.

this got me into programming, when I saw it during a school function in early 90s. wow there is a whole world inside this...

When I was younger (about six) I wanted to hack into NASA and release all their files on aliens and UFO's to the world so they would know the truth 🌎👽

There was a girl that I fell in love with.
As I went on a journey
We were separated by oceans
In order for me to reach her
I studied networking and programming
She is the reason
why I code

When I got my first PC the famous Pentium 1. It just hooked me. The struggle was real back then tho....

I was once using an app, made by my friend which could be used as a handy reference for programming topics. It crashed every time i clicked the last entry of the list. I told him that the app has a bug, probably some position mistake and he denied, saying that he doesn't need feedback from a guy who didn't code applications. I learned to code java and started android that night and knew I needed to give him a reply, a good one.

When I play "Super Mario" in computer and I wanted to do this game by myself. That's first moment that I want to become dev.

Can't do an 'if' in HTML...

My uncle introduced me to basic and used to challenge me to solve problems. One day he challenged me to write a program that generates the Fibonacci series. Thirty minutes later I had the solution and was irrevocably hooked :)

I had done some light development but always saw myself as a sysadmin, until I was passed over for a job. So when my wife had our second child, I wrote a program to help my department. I got a job as a developer a few weeks later and have been happy ever since then.

When I was 6 or 7 years old I said I'll work "at the company that makes diskettes" (for games).

I'm not a dev though - I'm a grad student. I hope my rants are still welcome here.

I knew i was gonna be developer when i scored 100/100 in school in computers for 3 consecutive years

Dreaming to be an architect as a child, to later discover that the world need precise calculations to work. Moved to 3D modeling, and then discovered Html trying to do a website for my models. From that to Js, Servers, Linux, C#... And the story continues...

When I was 11 or 12 and I found a magazine for kids that for some reason had an HTML tutorial to build a personal site with Microsoft Frontpage. I think it was 2006 back then and for a few weeks I learnt a lot about HTML, managed to create my site and upload it to a free host. I was fascinated. That was my first close up, at least, to something related to programming. From that day, I knew I was going to work with computers. Now I'm a Java dev but I'm still seeking the language for me. Maybe Javascript.

I knew I was destined for programming when I was 11 or so, and I would spend my days after school until bedtime building levels with the Doom map builder. Shortly after that I begged my parents for a C++ for dummies book. Never looked back.

When I started spending my weekends with code!

Wrote my first code on a commodore vic 20. I was 7 years old

When I was a kid, I saw "War Games". I was awed by the power of technology and the posibility of the AI. That was the moment when I decided that I wanted to be a dev.

When I was about 10 I decided to set up an imaginary business selling homemade stationary (notepads made of scrap paper!). It was a great way to entertain my younger sister making them whilst I programmed a full POS and inventory management system in BASIC.

Needless to say, my sister got bored of the idea long before I did. 20 years later I still use the same name as our imaginary business for any freelance work!

I knew I wanted to become a dev the day that I found out about the MissingNo glitch in Pokémon Blue Version.

About age 7 playing with lego an together with a friend was planing to build a robot. 3 years later I got to play with a computer for the first time, A brand new zinclair zx80 with 512 bytes ram (thats 1/2kbyte), and we got it to print 0 instead of syntax error :D

It was not until 20 that I had access to regular computing. In school I had to take up Finance as my Maths was weak. I couldn't take Sciences including computers and how could I , my childhood wasn't as fortunate as my peers.

When I entered college I got my brothers old gaming pc as we had a couple of work laptops at home. I was always the inquisitive one. I got interested in web development just because of curiosity while I was on my first job and I hated it. I used to write article and freelanced and ran a website for friends where I learned a lot by trial and error. I single handedly learned mySQL, PHP and basic web development.

The main job was a core night from 11pm -8 am . Drained me and my social life drowned. I lost my brother in an accident. Silver Lining: I quit my job.

I understood I was interested in computers like nothing else. I single handedly learned a programming language. After leaving the job I took up classes to learn from root level in a structured manner: Web design and Development.

Now though I am jobless and I am searching for my second job it is for something I love. :)

I could not do anything else. Physics, Chemistry, Biology didn't interest me.

Tried competitve programming, failed miserably.
Tried app dev and server dev, they surprise me with their awesomeness everyday :D

When I first moved 🐢 on the screen i knew I'm gonna love this shit
RT 90
LT 90
😊

When I replaced "World" in "Hello World" with my name, am like....faking hell!

When I first started playing Red Alert back in the day. I remember thinking yup this is it.

I was 11-12, the year was 1995. My mom was so sick of me screwing up the business computer (286), she bought me an old XT at a garage sale. It had a monochrome monitor and a 40 kB HDD. I taught myself qbasic on it. I knew right there I wanted to build stuff in code for a living.

I was 12 and saw that Google had a slide in there office, instantly sold.

When i was in my first cs class and thought I had been in the computer lab for an <i>hour</i> and realized it had been 6 hours. (if I have to work 40+ hours a week, it should be something so fun that I get lost in it and it that feels like 7 hours a week).

When I was 14 years old my mom wouldn't buy me a game which was for sixteen years old people. At this point I didn't know how hard programming actually is so I decided to make the game by myself. And now I'm sixteen and in love with programming. (by the way started with C++)

When working tech support for a company with a buggy product. I swore never to put anyone in the position I once was.

I always wanted to be an airforce pilot since I was a kid. Then snes came, spent a great deal of hours playing so many games. I got curious on how they were created and although I did it, I always wondered why people blow on cartridges if the game won't start. Fast forward to CS, Diablo 3, Red alert. I was fascinated whenever I type something on the console and something happened, that got me excited. Add that I was using wordstar and programming HTML/CSS in school when I was just 10-11. When I turned 12, I was programming using Borland C++. It just snowballed from there, curiosity and a series of my programs working made me focus a lot of my time talking to computers (especially when I built robots using lego mindstorms). While my classmates were having a hard tim deciding what course to take in college, I was already certain since I was just a sophomore in high school. I will write and talk to computers until I wear thick glasses.

So there it is, my dev story. Apologies for a lengthy post. 😀

When I was 8, I first saw a computer, and thought this is my future

When I was 11, I got my first computer and I thought, yep computer is my future

When I was 14, I had the option to learn computer studies, and this time, I thought nothing of it. I already knew what I was going to be.

I knew I wanted to be a dev when I saw the Game Developer Barbie come out...

Just kidding.

The moment I knew was when I started creating my own Myspace templates. It was so awesome to have one that I built myself. I wasn't forced to choose from those pre-made templates, none of which truly expressed my adolescent personality. :D

When I was a bord 12 year old I stumbled across a site called Codecademy and being the bored kid I was I decided to sign up and try a tutorial. I opened up the HTML tutorial and typed <p>Hello World</p> and I was just amazed that I could tell a computer how to do that. From that point on I was hooked

Started about 4 years ago after losing my job in social work. Realized I liked computers more than talking to people. Picked up a beginning Java text book, and worked through it in a month. I moved over to web development to help a buddy of mine and kill time while unemployed.

Since then, I've run a small web dev business and am currently director of technology for a company with an international presence. I still code on the side an recently launched a new mobile app with a buddy of mine from grade school.

I do not miss social work even a little bit.

I knew I had to become a dev when I started learning PHP instead of sleeping or playing while skipping my high school courses.

1990, I was about 11. my dad had old computer magazines that contained PRINTED basic games. I used to type those to the gwbasic console on my PC, play some, and then mod them for my younger brother's amusement.

When I finished playing the Half-Life series and decided that someone should make it go forward.

The dream continues...

when my senior dev told me my logic is awesome that I can be a good programmer

When I worked out I could get paid good money to sit on the PC all day and solve puzzles

I was 11, I picked up a Java book out of interest. I was fascinated from minute one. I got interned at a tech company 3 years later.

After I realized devs are wizards, watching the code.org video

I was an introvert while growing up hence I found interacting with non-living things easier. When I was 11 i.e. like 17 years I told my parents to enroll me into computer classes. They didn't see much of a future in it so they refused. I fought hard and finally they agreed. Hence started my journey with computers.

First week all students were allowed to explore the computer we were assigned and also were taught to play basic Windows 95 default games to make it interesting. It was all fun. Next week the teacher said he would be teaching us how to tell computer to do what we want i.e. programming. Hearing that I could make my computer do what I want excited me a lot. I felt I could finally communicate to a computer. This is how I learnt BASIC. I was so amazed I could do so many things like take input and do calculations etc. I decided I would do this kind of job in the future if it exists.

So now I am actually doing what I wanted to do when I started programming i.e. coding job!

I was very young, but my grandma had picked up an old apple 2 with asteroids on a 3.5 in floppy (maybe 1990) and it was really the first time playing games that it occurred to me that I could make them. From then on, I decided that I wanted to work in a space where my imagination was unbound and I could build anything I wanted from the ground up without any help. I've matured a bit since then, but I still find that basic love every now and again when I'm not dealing with red tape or fixing bugs in other people's code.

I first realised I wanted to be a developer, when my older brother told me about The Net (movie) with Sandra Bullock. He told me about the pi sign in the bottom right corner, and all I wanted to do was to make websites with secret sections that only I knew about.

i failed business classes

I actually only started programming a little less than two years ago. I entered my freshman year of college as a mathematics major, but as time went on I ended up enjoying coding in C++ much more than trying to work out partial equations.

I have since become fascinated with many aspects of computer science, mainly web development and systems programming (I discovered Linux and the command line only a year ago and I'm practically in love). I've since been working for a couple fairly new startups with duties from developing a mobile native app in AngularJS/Ionic to migrating content to new servers and developing custom themes on WordPress. I have deep, deep aspirations of eventually being employed by Google as a Senior Software Dev (although I'd definitely prefer working for a company that would allow 100% remote work 😁). I've even finally began developing my own projects, ranging from a URL shortening service to a basic online encyclopedia.

I wanna spend the rest of my life doing this shit. Hell, I hope I die at my computer.

people who says they don't trust Java garbage collectors so they use c++ has the most memory leaks

I was a child and I was playing Habbo, I was really addicted to it. A friend of mine in this game said me "why don't we create a fansite?" and I said "ok lol" because I imagined that creating a website would have been funny and easy. So I searched on Google how to create websites, and I discovered HTML. The first version was terrible, but with experience it went better day by day. It lasted 6 years and we had 200 users per day

I created fully working sudoku in excel...
And then I really wanted to know to create websites.

The feeling in the moments when I got things to work made want to be dev...

My dad. he inspires me to explore the computer world because he opened a computer service center when i was a kid. i followed him since then. but the only difference is i know a lot of coding than he does.

i'm very different than my other siblings who pursue career in medical world. that made me asked myself whether or not I'm adopted lol.

When I was 10 years orso old, I liked playing video games and I thought that it would be awesome to make my own game. I found Unity which I started messing around with and at that point it was pretty clear to me that coding video games (and in general) was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I discovered that you could make the computer talk using VB, and then I knew I had to learn all this.

the moment when i found the scripting panel on macromedia flash 5

When I was taking a programming course as a Mathematics prerequisite, and then object oriented programming basics (inheritence, interfaces specifically) all just clicked at once. Immediately decided I was going to pursue the computer science major instead of math.

The moment I knew that I was meant to be a dev was when I was 14 years old and it was computer class during high school. Basic HTML was the lesson and I was hooked by it. My favorite tags were the blink and marquee tags. I was fascinated by it! But learn to love web development when I knew what backend developing was about ;)

When I got a 5 on the comp sci AP exam without really trying. Studied hard for the other exams but didn't score nearly as high.

when I finished my first project which had >1800 lines of code and a visual interface 👐👌

Since I was a child I had always been interested in computers and when I bought a MacBook Pro at the age of 15 I discovered that I could make apps for iOS for free with Xcode and figured I could try it out. Started watching swift tutorials and shortly fell in love with programming. I then started building a stupid camera app, and published it on the AppStore. I am now working on my second project called ChairGame (musical chairs) I am 16 now and confident that I will become a developer.

First time I started playing with the VB macros in Word making little joke viruses to scare my friends.
Was 1997 and I was about 10 years old. Thankfully my playful streak never went past harmless practical jokes.

I knew I wanted to be a device in college when I found out about it and it all made sense. I loved computers, video games and programming seemed like a no brainer. Now I'm happily developing and graduated with a computer science degree.

After a long day of project management and endless emails, I would go home and dig through books and online training programs on html and css. A few weeks later I really found that enjoyed the work.

A year later I took the leap, quit my job and went back to school. Great decision.

started programming in high school, realized during a hardware lab in my computer science class that I wanted to be a developer.

we hade to set up a network of 5 routers, and I was the last to finish because of a typo in one config. spent an hour debugging, the frustration and eventual feeling of success made me love working with computers!

When I thought that I was the shit for figuring out that ctrl backspace deleted a word at a time. I was about 10.

I used to play games a lot, I had good grades at school which could make me a doctor or scientist. But my interest has always been leaning towards computers and my parents didn't really liked it. When I was having dilemmas about which path to choose for my career, parents told me, choose anything you want as long as it's not about computers. So immediately I know what I want to be...

Back when I was doing my uni final year project. i was given the choice of either writing codes or writing documentation (graphs, requirement and a whole lot of other madeup bullshit)

I deicide go with coding, sign up with laracast. watch a whole lot of screen cast. and BOOM, coding is easy - I was literally quoting bombastic technical terms like many-to-many relationship to my group mates after 2 videos. (didn't even know what was bootstrap at that time) Thats was when I decide I wanna code for a living. Laravel made me a developer.

My very first time was when I first saw a Web page, I really wanted to know how they did it. Two weeks later I built an intranet at home and I thought I was so cool I was shitting out ice cubes.

The very first programme I ever wrote was a secret diary application(C#) for myself I thought it was really secure because I had my own file extension. Not one of my finer moments.

After opening game files for Ragnarok Online and saw the quest files are human readable (lua or other scripting language). Had some Flash workshops to confirm my interest.
Later in college, I make games for every lecture projects (with my friends). Now our game studio is 7 years old.

My exploration into the dev world started back when Anonymous were actually something a bit more than just DDoS dicks. It started with joining in with the DDoSing, but that got me interested in how it works, how servers work, then how websites work, and it's all written from there!

When I was doing replacements in a text file manually and some smug coder did the same thing in 5 min after I'd spent a day doing it ...

I got a Commodore 64 as a Christmas gift at an age where I was far too young to fully appreciate it. I'd spend hours typing in code from printed magazines. Fell in love with it instantly. Nothing ever worked first time. Loading a game was a chore. It blew my mind. Little tear in my eye now thinking of how my late father and I would spend hours trying to get the beige-bastard to "play ball".

20 years ago, in China, they sold a so-called learning-machine which is a modified version of super Nintendo with a full sized keyboard, you could use it to learn how to type, and play Nintendo games. somehow it supports basic, and the manual book have printed a full code to create a stupid game with you could move a super Mario character with arrows, me and my step brother spend a whole day typed the 40+pages of code and enjoyed the game for 5 mins. BTW you can not save your program. after that I think it is so cool to create vedio games by programming.

Starting game modding on Garry's Mod 9 back in 2006. I was 14. I never thought it would turn into my career. Also I miss writing Lua

i was around 8, i saw my dad coding with VB3, I was fascinated. He taught a bit and showed me his project : A complete and very feature-heavy radar simulator, with lots of graphical elements and planez flying by. I was dumb struck. he even gave me a little project to do : A calculator. Thank you dad

Funnily enough my initial experience with Java at uni dampened my enthusiasm for programming I had harboured as a kid. Discontinued the course and studied something else. Cue three years later; took an elective programming in C and some other coding subjects and fell in love with coding. Ended up writing code for my bachelor thesis, lots of free time coding, teaching the elective I had taken only a year before, and now it's my job and I love it. :)

Pretty much when i stopped listening to the same old "my printer is jammed" requests in helpdesk and saw a friend dev earn twice as much as i dis at that time without dealing with (that many) idiotic situations.

A few years later - i'm a happy little coder. And i have my own minions to deal with support. Seniority rules :D

When I was in high school (~2005) I made a guess the number game in basic BASIC.

Thats when I knew I wanted to do that junk full time.

I was a Windows user from the start had an old windows pc og and ever since that computer and my first HTML book I've wanted to code and design as a passion hobby and now work

back in 2011, when a friend of mine was learning C and he told me he can control a micro controller remotely, and he actually showed me a video of that happening, that's when I decided to be a developer

hi beginner here

I followed a tutorial on modding minecraft, I made a block that got generated into the world. Ohh my god I was hooked when I saw it in the game. Been loving it ever since

My cousin was studying computer science, and he was telling me about the coding and the programming stiff, I got inpired by him and I since then I wanted to be a dev, especially when you can make some thing from nothing, unlike other jobs you have to get tools a parts and start to attach them together in order to make a product, while programming all you need is your laptop and couple of softwares and you can make as products as you want.
It is MAGIC

To understand recursion, just click these links:

There was a "Snake" game on an old windows machine that came with the source code. I was able to tweak the code enough to add interesting twists to the game. From then on I was hooked.

When me and my friends were working on a school project where we have to do a C++ bus reservation system (that will accept reservation and name of the person who reserved the seat / that will show a list of reserved persons / that will show a graphic design of a bus with seats that will be changed in design if reserved.). At first I can't comprehend the problem and develop a solution, but when my friend told me that "let's think that the value is a poop and the toilet is the variable, when we flush it, it will be sent to the sea/ocean/river and it will serve as a new element in the array" that is when I knew how I will do the damn project, then we passed it the night when the project was given, and we got recognition from our professor.

*my friend is already feeling the call of nature*

++ for my friend

To quote Terry Pratchett in Small Gods: "It's indoor work with no heavy lifting. Do you really want to be a ploughman like your father?"

The moment I knew I wanted to be a dev was very early in life, but I didn't realize it until I had gotten out of high school. My parents gave me my first computer when I was like 8 and it was my grandfather's old Windows 95 PC. I loved to play the Army Men game with the plastic figures like from Toy Story. I also tinkered around and found out how Word and some of the other programs worked. About two years later, I got his old Windows 98 PC. I continued to play around in Windows and discover some nuances of the operating system. My parents had a Windows XP machine at the time and they called me in every time they needed help. I got on their computer from time to time to use the Internet, where I discovered so many cool things. In junior high, we were forced to take a typing course where I honed my typing skills through playing games. I soon was able to easily complete all of the challenges. To understand my persona, you must know that I was bullied throughout elementary and high school. I was "the nerd" of our class and I wore that badge even with all of the negative energy that it came with. I received constant criticism, ridiculed for being intelligent (my paycheck isn't too funny now, is it losers?). I didn't care, though, my mission has and always will be to show them their wrong doing. I actually can't wait to have a reunion just to see how UNSUCCESSFUL they are. My parents didn't like my interest in gaming and technology either, but that's a rant for another day. After junior high, I wasn't exposed to much else until I got to college four years ago, where I took Fundamentals Of Computing. My professor was a true nerd (major Zelda fanatic), and he taught us how to program in Python. I began to love being able to create something literally out of nothing. He opened my eyes to a world where there was order and I could have control in a world where I've never had any control in before. Since then, I've only began to love my profession more and more. This is truly what I was born to do.

when my pc was 8 mhz and 12 with turbo on :-P

My father is a psyhologist, but he has always been a computer enthusiast. Particularly, he once started learning Excel macros, and then evolved into Visual Basic over Excel, with which he built a fairly large piece of software that is now run in many Spanish schools. I was 14 or so at that time. I always liked computers, and one afternoon my father and I sat down, and we built a simple calculator in vb. That was an amazing afternoon, and I got hooked immediately. From there I transitioned to Python, C#, Java, php... And now, many years later, I am about to graduate in CS, and I am still totally convinced that this is my passion. I owe this to my father, and in fact now I help him maintain and update that old piece of software.

My dad took me to a conference in town about microsoft XNA back when it was new. I was too young at the time to understand most of the content discussed, but I was blown away by the idea that with a bit of practise, I could make my own games too and much, much more. It was at that moment that I knew... the developer life was calling for me 😊

I guess it all started for me in the summer of 8th grade when I was 14. I saw all these javascript snippets for invisionfree forums, started learning javascript and html. later on I went into php development to make a arcade, it was pretty cool learning experience cause it used curl to login with invisionfree forums. a few years after that I got into c++ and I knew programing was what I was going to do the rest of my life cause there's no end to it

After writing my first php script that displayed a random forum signature image. Took me far too long but the end result was worth it.

Felt proud after my first mini refractor that automatically picked up images from a folder on my geocities web hosting lol.

Cannot tell you how much win I felt at the time :)

I always wanted to become a business man like my dad and I was going to study BBA. Until I saw the tv show Person of Interest, I know it sounds silly but it inspired me to make my own AI system that can predict stuff.

I could not make the machine or Samaritan, but in my final year project, we managed to make an AI system that can categorize emails automatically without any input from the user. The system can create category names by itself and put the emails accordingly.

Back in 2005 while I was in grade 5.. I was given a computer assignment for MS Word. While opening word, I stumbled upon FrontPage, which was the first spark in my web Dev interest. That was the beginning, it was only 4 years later that simple web design was part of my computers class. That is where things really started. I began coding small websites. And in 2012, my school requested I make a small website for a school event. I did so using a free template xD

I started perfecting my skill in 2013 and have been learning different languages ever since. Got my first clients in the same year too, 2013.

the moment when we made a Miami Vice inspired Rambo parody game with John Rasta ninja fighting Federal Agent Man to save his uncle from arrest because he possessed some sacred herbs. This was a school project... never got to know if our teacher got the hidden message or not...

When I first met the Logo turtle I was hooked. Then learned Pascal. Saw recursion and my brain exploded. 23 years and still love it every day 🐢

I mostly come back to programming for the kicks of when something actually works :) But the reason I started was a life changing moment of black and green Space Invaders some 30+ years ago. After that it was all about computers and/or gaming.

My mom thought she was being smart saying I could buy something for my own money. Saved like crazy and sold all my toys. That got me 8bit Sega Master System.

I continued with C64, Amiga 500, a few Pentiums and a bunch of PCs before iMacs and Macbooks took over.

There are so many better developers so just as with music I just create stuff for fun, challenge and personal expression. But at work there are also opportunities to improve the world a little bit by dev work and I'm always grateful for the chance.

It all started when I got my first iPhone. I had so many ideas for any kinds of apps, so I wanted to learn how to program them. I went to school and learnt programming. (I started with Java)
While beeing at that school I taught myself Objective-C and I started to write Apps. After school I got a job as an iOS Developer.

When I was in school days I didnt like computers that much. I knew how to use them but thought classes were lame.

It was a couple of years ago, in the last year of my first computers-related career (here there's no computer science like in USA). It was in the initial stages of my graduation project and our teacher took a look at our database design, fixed it all. And explained:

"The better you designed your database, the easier it'll be to code the project" Explained to us the importance of database normalization and all that.

I really understood it all and discovered finally what was the thing I was studying and how to do software.

From that day, in my early 20s, I've been loving software and knew this is my thing.

Same feeling 6 years later.

On a 8088 Acer 500+ with a whopping 640KB RAM with Clipper and dBase III+ on MS-DOS 3.30 back in 1988.

Programming gave me a sense of accomplishment. The feeling of being able to dream something up, and then make that come to life, and always improving yourself as you go. What else gives you the same flexibility to change and add on to projects? All of this combined for my love of math and mechanics, and I found that programming was my true love!

I first got into programming when I was really young. I recall programming a square at a museum in Ohio, and after that I was hooked. I learned Logo and was on the web dev team for my elementary school while attending there. I used Hotdog HTML editor 😂

starting programming when my father Gave me a copy of macromedia director and I figured out you could make games with it (some years ago)

When I was 11 or 12, and wrote my first webpage in php, designed with tables. Tables was the shit back then. none of that fancy flex box or bootstrap, and 50% of the internet was flash. T'was a good time to be alive.

Today, I am starting learning java, and is not complicate. Until now... hahahahah

In school,our c++ teacher gave an list of programs we had to do in lab that annual session,i was excited about learning programming so i strtrd reading my c++ book & completed all those programs in less than a month......

I think it was when I watched Call for Help on TechTV when I realised you can change things on Windows by modifying the Registry. After that I found that I wanted to change more and more things, but the registry would only take me so far.

After a while I got discontented with just changing values and wanted to create something of my own. Then came my first taste of Visual Basic then C, then Python, then HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I don't think anyone had a much fun as I did at 12 years old.

When I first got Linux, then fell in love with diving through the system on the command line. Then I also realised I finally had the confidence to learn what I wanted, instead of what was advised to me.
Still in no way confident with programming, but I'm getting there.

TL;DR: Computers and I go way back, but I don't know how I ended up as a dev - and am still not certain that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Rewind to the early 80's. My friends at the time got the Comodore 64 one after the other. I never got one. Heck, we didn't even have a color TV back then. Only a 12/14" small B&W TV. It's easy to conclude that I spent a lot of time at my friends'.

Back then it mostly was about the games. And, living in the rural countryside, the only way to aquire games was to pirate them. Pirating was big. Cassette tape swapping and floppy disk swapping was a big deal, and gamers contacted eachother via classifieds sections in newspapers and magazines. It was crazy.

Anyways. The thing about pirated games back then is that they often got a cracktro, trainer, intro or whatever you want to call them - made by the people who pirated the game. And I found them awesome. Sinus scrollers, 3D text, cool SID-tunes and whatnot. I was hooked.

My best friend and I eventually got tired of just gaming. We found Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, which was an easy point-and-click way to create our first little game. We looked into BASIC a bit. And we found a book at the library about C64 programming. It contained source code to create your own assembler, so we started on that. I never completed it, but my friend did.

Fast forward through some epic failure using an Amstrad CPC, an old 486 and hello mid 90's. My first Pentium, my first modem and hello Internet! I instantly fell in love with the Internet and the web. I was still in school, and had planned to enter the creative advertising business. Little did I know about the impact the web would have on the world.

I coded web pages for fun for some years. My first job was as a multimedia designer, and I eventually had to learn Lingo (Macromedia Director, anyone?) And Actionscript.

Now I haven't touched Flash for about 7 years. My experience has evolved back to pure web development. I'm not sure if that's where I will be in the future. I've learned that I certainly don't know how to do everything I want to do - but I have aquired the mindset to identify the tasks and find solutions to the problem.

I never had any affiliation with the pirate scene or the demo scene. But I still get a little tingling whenever I see one of those sinus scrollers.

I wanted to know how to make my drawings interactive.

I think I was 15, I found a VB tutorial and decided to try it out.

tl;dr
that moment was a full semester

full
I was an Electrical Engineering major taking a Data Structures class and for the first time, I understood the title computer SCIENCE. In EE, you just blueprint all day long, but you never build anything. In CS you build and blueprint at the same time.

From an early age as far as I can remember I always used to break/open stuff - that my parents bought for me - such as.. small electronics or it could be even a stressball 😂 to find out what was inside or how it worked. This habit of extreme curiosity, somehow ended me up in programming.

Wrecked and fixed my PC every other week in 2004. Later started doing it for the whole neighborhood. Knew then and there what I had to go in life.

After failing Chemical Engineering and Med school... I later chose Computer Systems Engineering and loved my very first HelloWorld.java program!

Never really knew what i wanted to do in life so i decided to apply to a CS program because i liked gamed. Ovet time it just happened and now I'm apparently doing it for money. Life can be funny like that.

they say i was a natural at programming. i like it, i understand problems easily and im able to find a solution for it. but so was math, and chemistry. basically anything that has problem solving so i wasn't into programming that much.

until i joined my first competition. man that was an eye opener. we had a deadlock tie with the other team, and there was this one problem that was a tie breaker. sure enough we both was able to solve it. but the judges ruled in our favor because of one thing, i used recursion! man that was fun. the looks on their faces.

and i was hooked on that euphoric feeling. that was my drug. now , a decade or so later, im still addicted to that drug

When I was at my previous sales job, explaining the same sales pitch for the 987345284th time, listening to my customers' every irrational need, I suddenly realised I wanted to work with something rational and logical. Best insight of my life!

I missed this last week... so too bad ;)

My introduction into programming was rather slow. When I was a child, we had an Apple IIc, but there were no disks. When you'd boot it up, you got a prompt and I recall being able to type commands into it that someone told me was "Apple BASIC".

At the same time, our family computer was a 386 and it came with something called GWBasic. I was a huge Mortal Kombat fan as well, and I recall finding the moves for the game on an AOL usenet. I took them all and wrote a program in BASIC that let you search and find moves for your character. I distributed this on some floppies to friends.

After that I lost interest. My "Information Systems" shop in high school was more about how to use Office than it was about programming. A few years later I found out that you could run your own text-based games (MUDs) and I quickly jumped into that and the C language.

From there, I was in and out of programming - C, to C++. Java and PHP, then back to Java. It would be about 15 years later until I finally realized I wasn't bad at this and land a job doing it. :)

I knew when my dad showed me gwbasic on a tandy 1000. Never did more than a high/low guessing game but not bad for a 7 year old. I so do not miss having to manually number lines.

I was about 12 years old and I was in 2nd year of high school (here in Belgium high school is from 12 to 18 after which you go to college or university). During that year I befriended someone who was already very interested in computer stuff and things and he kind of set me off. Ever since he got me into IT I really never looked back. (he is still my friend by the way and I'm now in college)

Playing around with GW-BASIC on an old 286 when I was maybe 8 I knew that I would spend my life programming. It was magic. It's less magic now, but I know I will not run out of challenges in my life or career, and that's pretty good too :)

When I proudly showed my Hello {}! application and my friend told me it was useless.

I thought I could make something cooler

I knew I was good in all my computer related subjects (despite being a business major) but never thought html taught in high school stayed in my stored knowledge longer than I imagined until my friend asked me to help him on a project: developing a website. And that was the start of my dev life

When I was about 11 years old (now 22) on Piczo messing around with little JavaScript hacks. I was fascinated with the idea that I could write code and have the computer/website do what I want. From then I went on to learn more and more, and the rest is history.

i never wanted lol

My Grandma had an old PC in my childhood. That laid the stone. Then I took a "PC Basics" course in my hometown in 4th-grade, which covered Building a PC, programming it with the weird Turtle stuff and Lego Mindstorms.

Learned HTML in 4th grade. Tried C++ in 5th. Took a while to get serious, 10th grade Java gave the last kick. Studying CS now at the TUM and working as a Web Designer in parallel.

8 years old, first computer. 12 tears old first laptop. Around the time of bebo, I started messing with Photoshop making skins, then I made a website to put these skins on, after that I became involved with the SMF message board software, offering support, creating mods and themes. Eventually started working with individuals and businesses designing and building there websites, went to college got a taste of Java & vB, continued onto a degree and now I can program in Java, vB, C#, C, Javascript/Coffeescript, Node, PHP, Python and Bash with experience with too many libraries and frameworks to count, at 24 years of age going into the last year of my degree. I never really realised I wanted to become a dev. I just kind of naturally progressed into it.

started 20y ago ... playing around with my 486 dx4
still haven't decided if want to

when another hobby programmer created a blank windows form in Delhi. first he added a button and then he said "what if the button could move to the left on when I click it?". my mind was blown away. it was 20 years ago. ;)

When I was 14 I saw a book about game programming in Visual Basic for 2$. I decided to get it. With this I wrote my first code, then Pong. Then I started C++ with a book called 'From noone to game coder' (in my language rhymes tho).

I knew I wanted to be a Dev ever since I discovered that the Apollo missions, used a flight computer less powerful than a average mobile phone.

If they could put a man on the moon with that, imagine what I could do now...

when I found that I want to do all the possible jobs in the world, I decided to go to developing applications for everyday and everybody...

I always loved playing with computers. When I was a kid, it was mostly games. JezzBall was such a classic ;). After that, it was mostly the Internet, aol, yahoo chat rooms, etc. As soon as I realize that some people's job was to actually make computers tick I was sold. Took a second to debate computer science/engineering. After that all I wanted to do was code. I graduated with a CS degree last year and I'm very pleased with my work. Wouldn't want to do anything else.

I got really interested in computers from gaming. Starting back with dial up Doom games with my friends to Team Fortress Classic clan matches. I recently downloaded Diablo 2 to replay it. The C++ class I took in High School solidified my fascination with coding. I quickly moved on to learning web coding and creating my own websites. Now it's a job I love.

I was subscribed to a computer book and magazine publisher in my country and I learned many things such as Word, PowerPoint, etc from its books. One day they sent me a book about Visual Basic 6. I didn't have any idea about it but I started it and at the end I was able to make an app to calculate my exam scores in a graphical interface. Since then I was addicted to coding. Language after language...

It is when I'm doing my fyp during my college studies. I in-charge on the front end part, but i do a lot of debugging for back end part because my teammates aren't very good at it.

full of coding day and night, i found it is enjoyable 😁😁😁

from then i consider my career to be a web developer. and here i am 🤓

That moment I saw a yeti factories intro with rasterbars on the commodore 64 at my cousins house, I knew I need to know how the f**k this was done! I was 10y old 😁

Keep losing in an online FPS at age 13 and kept getting banned for using public "hacks", build my first hacks and made 60 bucks selling them, made punkbuster my bitch at age 14. still enjoying building everything I can imagine to impress myself.

tldr; I failed a web class once, then practically taught people actionscript. Now i love JavaScript/Node.js because flash is icky.
-full story more or less-
I failed my first web design class in college due to not having enough time to actually study(I worked 2 jobs and took 6 classes like a moron). Anyway took a flash class prior to retaking my web class, I picked up on action script really quickly. As in I ended up helping other students better than the instructor was(she hadn't touched flash in like 5 years and was just an adjunct instructor). I got hooked with action script so I started teaching myself JavaScript, knocked the web class out like nothing after that and loved it.

i always enjoyed computes and was always impress by them and by how much they could do. i stoped following computers and joined the U.S Military. while in, i would program a little here, a little there. thats when i decided that i was actually going to pursue it. so i started after i left the U.S Marines. at the age of 22 ish.

When I knew the games on my Texas Instruments calculator was made by simple text files

That moment when I.. Wait, I think it's when... NAH... Never had one. It doesn't mean I hate it thought. For me it's more: I fall in love with it in the process of learning it.

I got my first PC when i was 8 years old.
I played games, and just played around with the computer configurations etc..
I also remember in my English class, I was asked to say what i wanted to be when i grow up, so I told the teacher: "When i grow up, i want to become a computer"
well who's laughing now b*tch

I created a 5 card draw poker game in vb.net in 11th grade and afterwards knew that I wanted to write code for a living.

i knew i was going to be a dev when i was learning html and css during governmental exam

I (with some help) wrote a gui app for Ubuntu that would help running bin files without the need of the terminal.

The sheer excitement from getting that stuff to work was what sparked my interest.

when i programmed an anchor button in html

My parents signed me up for a robotics class in 5th grade. I learned TC Logo for the first time and made my Lego creations move with code. It was mind blowing, so much so that I dove face first into anything I could do with PCs. That same summer, I learned how computers worked and took them apart for fun.

I had used a computer since the win 3.1 days and I fooled around with VB on win 95 or 98. I didn't know it was going to be my passion until i wrote a whole data structures library in c++ based on my double linked list i wrote for a class. I called it the ETL, for easy template library (like the STL was hard!!). Thats when i knew i had a knack for it and began really learning.

Had a class in middle school that put on a web dev competition for the county school district. I took 3rd or something because the "Gothic colors" didn't align with the county's vision. I knew I wanted to become a dev from that point forward. Side Note: I now deal very little with HTML and CSS and couldn't be happier.

A friend introduced me to mIRC and told me it's a good place to meet girls. I however ended up meeting people who showed me nice things you can do with HTML.

From that I learnt other stuff such as mIRC scripting, Flash action script, etc...

I have wanted to be a web designer, studied multimedia design, and have always done some code of my own because I couldn't pay anyone to code my projects. After finishing my degree I was a unemployed and couldn't even get an internship. One day a friend asked me to code a project for his agency because he couldn't find anyone on such short notice. I did it in a weekend and got some good money for it. That's when I realised there was a chance I could be a dev instead of a designer. Started to learn more, moved to London, and never even wished I went back to design.

When I first discovered QBASIC installed on my machine, cracked open the source code to Gorillas, and tried changing it to see what would happen.

Back in 2002, when I was 11, I wrote one of my first programs (a calculator in VB5) and then showed all my friends as it was the most amazing thing ever: "look, I made a computer program". Nobody cared by then. I see now some of them are also software developers.

When I was 8 years old and I mastered to get Gameboy games back working by blowing in the hole on the side of the connector, I've always said I would become game developer. I became one, minus 'game'.

Startet programming when I was 6 on my dad's 286 in Qbasic and learnt other languages as I grew up. It was always this, hacking or psychology for me. In the end the ex told me she was pregnant while I was doing my thesis.
So then I knew I had to be a dev.

The first time was the time my father bought a pc for his work,I was around 5,I didn't know anything about computers back then,I just wanted to change things and see what happens!The first time I actually understood what devs do was the first year of high school when I started to learn C++ :))

7th grade. HyperCard on a Macintosh LC

My parents showed me how to play "Spy Hunter" on their Pentium III Windows 98 machine when I was 2, and I started installing games. Fast-forward to elementary school there was a game design afterschool class where we learned to use "Scratch" to drag-n-drop pieces of code used for animating and creating games. I wanted to do "real coding" so I got an internship at a local company, learned HTML, Java, JavaScript, and Python. Now, I'm developing games in Unity engine, and making mods on SourcePawn. The consumer is becoming a creator.

2005, after I tried to program my computer to be quicker. By the time I realized that it was impossible, I was hooked.

When I finished playing the Half-Life series and decided that someone should make it go forward.

The dream continues...

Fell into it. We needed some custom software at work but we didn't have the money to make it so I stepped up.

At once upon a (7 years old) time when I need to input code to cheat on AR/GameShark for playstation.
That moment just calls my nature..

To hack stuffs. lol. 😂😂

I don't think there was a defining moment of clarity that I said "I want to be a dev". I became interested in computers when I started learning BASIC from a set of programming books that came with our family's encyclopedia set. I moved on to "hacking" some .ini files in a DOS game called Tank Wars to make the text in the game into vulgar insults. My friends and I would tear our parents computers apart and re-assemble them much to their chagrin. After a failed attempt at a Bachelor's Degree in Graphic Arts I decided to go back to school for CS. My CS degree was Windows centric but I really wanted to be a Linux SysAdmin so I started to learn on my own and switched to using Ubuntu as my primary system. Ever since then I have been a Linux HPC SysAdmin and haven't looked back!

wk10

I was working as a lab tech/data analyst and wrote a bunch of macros to make my job less monotonous and decided I'd rather code all day than make graphs in Excel. A year-and-a-half later, I was 1 internship away from 2 associates degrees, so I quit my job and got the one I'm doing now. I love the work, but wish they'd pay me more.

A bit long, sorry.

I "inherited" an A+ certification book from my older brother over 10 years ago after he saw me meddling with some old computers that still used SIMM's. I still lived in my native country at the time and got my A+ certification through my high school when I moved to the US. I knew before I got the book that my career would revolve around IT.

I learned HTML and CSS right after I finished high school and started working with JS and PHP because of WordPress a year later. To this day I still help family and friends with IT related stuff, but after digging into web development I made it my main focus. I am now working on my CS degree after failing at college years ago because of laziness and procrastination. I also work at an amazing startup as a software engineer for the web. That's it in a nutshell, questions are welcome.

Can I get a stress ball? 😅

i was around 10 year old. That time we used to use ms dos for drawing lines, traingle and stuff using commands that will print on execution . I was having hard time understanding it . I went to my father and asked for help. He taught me how it works and everything is logic only nothing else.That was life changing movement for me. Use to score very good in computers then on . Now a full time web developer

I still remember that afternoon when I was in 9th grade, it was raining outside, I entered in the lab for the first time, and there she was sitting alone, shining like a dew drop. I could not resist, and I sit with her for a while, we talked, we touched, and the magic happened. that was the day and today is the day, no one can take us apart. We are like made for each other. That was for the first time I touched a machine, and never looked back. The endless possibilities with programming, and desire to fulfil the everlasting thirst of creativity and problem solving made a developer/programmer/mathematician/physicist.

Years ago there was a booom with counter-strike portals and I wanted to have one by myself. I uploaded php-fusion on ftp, download a free template and fill content. But, basic profile was not so interesting as on other sites. So I found a dev, sgo wrote me better profile (for free). I wanted to show user id but didn't want ask him, so I tried (echo in html) 4 hours of trying print a simple variable. When I already done it, that feeling was beautiful and I realized, that I can do changes by myself and try other things. Next was basic VIP plugin (with sql injections etc.) which I sell to other people and that was the moment I know I will be dev

I probably knew I wanted to be a dev/programmer in late highschool. I was fascinated by the underlying structure to what I see on a computer screen, and idolized those who "hacked" as a form of political rebellion.

Now I'm in my senior year in college as a Computer Engineering major because CS was ridiculously competitive at this college. I'm actually quite happy about this, because I feel I know more about computers in general by taking this path rather than CS.

I got to see a C graphics program . T hat really put me into gears for programming.

I guess it was right when I discovered there was an API to open and close the CD tray #vb6

When I was 7-8 i was introduced to programming on a BBC Micro. You could code on it with the BASIC language directly. I found a book about coding BASIC, read it over and over like a holy text, and coded pointless password programs and maze games. From the moment I started, I knew that is what I was going to do when I was older.

My parents bought a C64 when I was about 8. After getting bored of Flimbo's Quest and Klax, I started looking at the manual and discovered a world of creativity.

I remember slavishly copying dozens of lines of Basic code. After what seemed like hours I was rewarded with a tiny sprite of a balloon floating across the screen.

My sister thought I was crazy; I thought it was the best thing ever.

We never had a tape or floppy drive, so I copied the same code out at least half a dozen times!

MySpace 😂 lol but no for real back when I was a Psych major people started asking me to make them a site after seeing some random sites I dinked with in my spare time for personal endeavors. I then realized it could be a career, so I switched schools and majors. I enjoy getting lost in the code and doing solitary work. I don't like talking to clients or providing customer support so, yeah lol 😂🤓

I saw some game maker software (Klik & Play for the nerds), in a super market budget section and pestered my mum to buy it for weeks, got it, after a year of playing about started to read and found out about for loops & functions..... My software didn't have these as it was just creating actions for game events, very limited... Realised my games (if you could call them that) could be so much better with more control and started to look into languages like BASIC, the rest is my history :)

I knew I wanted to be a dev in 10th grade when my Chem teacher told me about the work environment & pay at Google. When I actually started learning to code, it was so much fun & the whole Google thing just seems like an added perk if I make it there.

(Apple wasn't quite the place for me)

got to play adventures of hugo when i was 6yrs old, a game where you need to type in commands for the character to execute. when i finished the game, my dad told me, that's programming. and i was like O_o this is my destiny

When I got all pre installed PC games blocked in my lab at school because my teacher caught me playing instead of coding(I finished my program well ahead of class. The teacher still hates me, by the way).

To make it up to my now annoyed fellow classmates, I coded 3 games, and also when the teacher left the lab for something, I hacked her system to unblock the games.

That's when I knew I'd be good at developing!

While shopping with my mom when I was 10 (that was 10 years ago…) I found a book called 'Andy\'s HTML'. That book got me started.
Followed by Wordpress later, couldn't stand that for long and quickly went over to real PHP projects. Eventually landed on Android because of school.

Good ol' times.

Since i was little i always wanted to amaze my friends with something. Back then it was magic, then it was music and now it's programming. Please don't kill me but i remember looking at hackers and stuff and seeing how they could remotely control other people's computers and i just wanted to learn that so i looked it up on google and found a post somewhere saying that if you're a hacker and don't even know basic html then you're not a hacker so i decided to learn html. Not so long has passed and i still want to be a developer so i am trying to learn javascript and then start moving to heavier languages. No one i know codes and i'm really alone so if i can simply make something cool with javascript they will be amazed, in the end that's all i want.

Starting off making a pub quiz in BASIC and feeling blown away that the computer could 'remember' the players' scores! Joy making that happen. Seems a loooong time ago!

my story is not sensational. i just wanted to do my cs labs and not be embarrassed in front of my friends. so i learned programming.

As soon as we got into the actual coding part of my first college programming class, I loved it. The next semester, I took two more programming classes and an introductory web development class, and about halfway through that semester, I knew this was what I wanted to do for a living. 2 1/2 years later, I've worked as web developer, both for a small company and a freelancer, I have a web development internship lined up for this fall that I'm excited about, I've written a few smaller programs in a couple languages just for fun, and I wouldn't want to do anything else at this point.

When i saw how by applying logic and "writing some lines of code" i could create something no short of an art piece, at least for me. Prior to that moment i've never found something i Both enjoyed and were good at (that i could make a career of, that is), so from that moment on, i just knew that mine was the path of the coder :-)

I initially thought I wanted to go to college for video editing, then I changed my mind and wanted to go into graphic design. Those didn't work out and I began contemplating what I could do with my life. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I could make a career out of the hobby I had since the age of 13. Never even considered it before that moment.

Started developing an interest in programming after creating warcraft 3 maps using the world editor. I still remember those days where I used the gui trigger editor, where I don't even know the difference between local and global variables, preventing memory leaks by using leak check and etc. Creating new skills using triggers was so exciting. Then I discovered JASS, but I didn't really learn or use much about it. Now I'm working in Unity3D and it is awesome!

1988 - Age 8 sees a young boy with a Commodore 64 and several copies of commodore format typing in code from the magazine. First program I got to work was a dtmf dialler using to speaker to ring a grandparent. Been hooked ever since

My friends were talking about modding their brawl to give them weird powers, so I signed up to take a programming class in high school. After that, I was hooked.

I was in junior college working on a mechanical engineering degree taking Calculus 1, some other classes, and a beginner level C programming class.

I decided being a ME wasn't for me as I couldn't handle the math, but the programming was a lot of fun. I ended up dropping Cal 1 and changing majors only to find out that I needed to transfer to a 4 year school to continue on the developer track. A few years later in December of 2013 I graduated with my BS in Computer Information Systems and a couple of years after that I had a great job as a dev.

I started with batch and basic on my black and white 286 when I was around 10 y/o. Knew right then that I wanted to be a "computer programmer".

The moment i knew i wanted to be a programmer was actually after i had dropped out of my IT school.

I was finding coding hard a nd questioning my passion for it. during my time off i was still frequenting an IRC where people were talking about C and coding and it made me realize i missed it. after months of not finding a job, disappointed in myself for regretting my decision and finally finding employment at tim hortons which was god awful, i quit tim hortons after a month, applied late back into the program at IT school and graduated.

It was the kick in the ass i needed.

When HTML and CSS wasn't enough.

I think its a bit of a cliche. But when I saw "The social network" I knew this is what I was gonna do. I always loved maths, physics and logic, though. So, I guess its no surprise I ended up being a dev.

When I was 10 I fell in love with designing DnD type games on paper, and I knew I was going to take that childhood passion and dream and make it a reality

I wanted my MySpace and Xanga to look better and function better than everyone else's.

I created a very basic directory on my xanga linking people's real names to their respective xanga for my group of friends. I started getting requests to add people to my directory. All my friends would go to my xanga first so they could easily find our friend's xangas.

I created social networking.

lol jk.

But it felt good knowing that I made the Internet a bit easier to use.

how many people started learning to program on a commodore 64?