> In college
> group of 3
> we decided to make a list of songs website that allow user to download it.
> No idea how webserver worked
> only know html and css
> decided to make one html for each letter the song starts with
> it was fun but stupid

"I think I can automate this..."

My 14 year old self stared at Chrome and decided to consult Google on a random fleeting thought...

"How is software made?"

The search resulted in my downloading Visual Studio. Without any understanding of what it was or how it worked I somehow managed to create a new Winforms project.

I started to drag controls from the ToolBox onto the form, and I specifically recall thinking "Wow! This is easy.". Little did I know...

I then inadvertently double clicked either a control or the form which as most will know switches from the designer view to the code editor taking you to the code that drives the form.

"What the hell is this?"

I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at, but decided I was determined to understand what all of that random text did.

So, yeah, my first dev project was a Winforms App consisting of a single button that did absolutely nothing, but yet happens to be the most important app I have ever created.

To think I'd be working in an entirely different sector if it wasn't for that one Google search.

I started early in my childhood days, nobody had cellphone or internet here, my phone number was 3 digits long and my home country started to recover from 44 years of communism.

My first dev project was probably to copy game from newspaper to Atari 1300XE

Article listing was around 10 pages long and if you made mistake program didn’t run.
It took me a while I can’t remember how long but probably whole day and I was finally able to play it.

I don’t remember what was game about but later on I learned some BASIC from book and was able to color the screen and stuff like that.

I was about 6 years old.

I also remember that Atari computer had tape recorder where you put cassette to load game.
Some more complicated games were loading more then hour and you need to walk very carefully around or your walk can cause error and operation would fail.

Besides that there were national radio auditions about Atari where at the end they played code sound wave so you can record it on your cassette and then play software from radio on your Atari.

I never managed to do it cause I was living near military airport and pilots were practicing landing and starting above my home causing radio signal noise and breaking my software recoding.

I can probably say that highly accelerating plane could cause game loading problem and it’s not a joke.

When I was about 10 I tried to make a basic midi sequencer/synthesiser using just the python standard library.
The only sound production there was was winsound.beep, which played a sine wave at the frequency given.
I realised that if I put enough really short beeps together I could make some mildly convincing instruments - I remember an electric piano, acoustic guitar, some kind of bass synth, and maybe more?
Then I put them together to make a song. The problem was though that you can't play multiple notes together as winsound.beep was blocking (though I didn't understand that at the time).
I had no knowledge of threading or async so I opened multiple python interpreter instances to play multiple channels. That's how I learnt about command-line arguments!
But I really struggled to get the sounds to be in time because python is not exactly rapid.
I made a kind of note sequencer using a library called easygui, based on tkinter (TCL wrapper), and I remember being told off at school for bringing in a usb stick with the exe of my program that I made with py2exe.
So many old technologies and fond memories...

> 14 years old
> Read about worms
> Making virus sounds cools
> Decided to make one
> Dreamed how I would use it on my friends
> Made a "virus" that looks for all the exe files and append "malicious" content
> Ended up messing my own system

This story makes me feel that I was
1) dumb
2) slow af( took me days to read/write properly)

One of those has changed now 😜

I was in second year of University when I joined the internship, I knew the business idea sucks and he wouldn't be able to carry out the operations either. Little did I know that I will work with the dumbest team ever, literally, the dumbest.

So, the major chunk of the software was outsourced to a consultancy. I was a tech intern, and we were developing an Android App that will save your parking location, let you reserve locations and all etc.

I knew I have stepped on a wrong turf, but again, I had nothing better to do that summer. So, for a very meager stipend, I said yes to a very stupid project. Let the stupidity flow...

~ The boss, had quit his job for this dumb idea with no funding, no team, nothing.

~ He was pursuing a certification course in Android Development from somewhere, where their final project will be a calculator!

~ He had little to no tech skills, hardly knew Java but was leading an Android App Dev project in Java. He had little to no managerial, marketing or sales skills either.

~ For a brief period, I had to work along with the consultancy guys to ramp up their work. They would take backups in a USB drive every evening, and share each others code using the same. VCS died a painful death that day.

~ They hardly wrote functions, rather, wrote very long code in the main (onCreate) function. Code style died of cancer.

~ They couldn't compress an image before sending it to a server. I had to do it for them.

~ Had no concept of creating utility classes.

And best of all,
~ Wrote 20 cases (switch case) with the same code! Instead of using a loop...

First time I developed something useful:

My dad has a bunch of games on his work computer, which he wasn't supposed to have. I wrote a small program for him that added the name of the directory which held those games to IO.SYS table of devices (COM1, LPT1, etc...) so nobody could open it.

Oh god, I was like 13 and just found out about RPG Maker 2000. I got a pirated copy from a friend because ive got no internet at that time. I remember, my first project was with a friend of mine and dayum, we were so dumb and unknowing.

Once we wanted to implement a counter of how many fights a player had.
The problem was, we only knew about switches (boolean variables) and so we started to implement boolean variables like these:

hadOneFight
hadTwoFights
hadThreeFight
and so on, as something like a counter.
We took this to 50 before I asked my friend if this is the right way of doing this.

He answered: "thats probably the reason, why games are so big nowadays" (he just installed morrowind at home...)

Then at one day, I reached the point I didnt knew what I should do next in this project, so I looked around at all the other functions we never even tried and I found something called "variables".
Those where the "real" variables like string and int and wow, suddenly the possibilities where endless. I told him about variables at telephone and what we could do now, but that just got him somehow frustrated so he told me, that he wants to leave this programming thing

My first dev project was 6 years ago in which I made a fucking gui application in c++ using fucking TurboC++.

And used no gui libraries. Used to draw circles/rectangles/pixels right on screen using graphics.h library

Was fun though

It was 1987. I was 13. My first dev project started with a $1,300 IBM PC XT clone I bought from a relative who was a “dealer” of PCs for some company. It took all the savings I had from birthday money and mowing lawns for several summers at $5 a pop.

My mom wanted to encourage me to learn it more in depth, and she also wanted to know more for her job as a librarian, so she bought us a bunch of books about DOS, BASIC, and Assembler.

I first got familiar with DOS and then dove into Assembler without realizing what it really was (and how much easier BASIC would be). After hours and hours of typing in what, to me, then, was complete gibberish, I grabbed the BASIC book to see what it had to offer.

I never went back to the Assembler book.

A kid at school had given me a BASIC program he had typed in from a magazine. It was a flight simulator of sorts but with a helicopter, IIRC. I loaded up that bad boy and got to hacking. I didn’t get much done with it but I did build a few other menu navigation programs to explore the language more.

That led to PROLOG, C, PASCAL, Visual Basic, Perl, ASP, ColdFusion, and now PHP.

My first dev project was making a small 3D engine in GameMaker 7 when I was 14. I had been using gamemaker for two years then but I never got past the "platformer movement and collisions" and "top down movement and collisions"

It was the first thing I made myself without following a tutorial and spend quite a few afternoons at school to ask my Math teacher to explain things like sin cos and tan. Words I saw on the internet but did not understand.

A java text adventure. It was a good starting project, but needless to say, it's not seeing the light of day anytime soon

My first dev project. That is a toughie. Years ago (1998) I did some BASIC programming in HS. Then a few years after that (somwhere between 2002 and 2006) I did a lot of video game editing with hex editors and other tools to replace dialog to translate video games from Japanese to English, but there was not much coding there.

The first one I remember in recent times that involved any kind of coding was back in 2012/2013, there was a save state editor for Final Fantasy III on android (it didn't work for the iOS saves) but the editor was in Chinese. I ended up working with someone else to change it to English, so that others could use it easier. After that, I decided to code one from scratch for a different game.

I spent weeks working on it, and finally released a save editor for Final Fantasy Dimensions (I made sure it worked for both iOS and Android save files). It was my first great achievement, however it was way to many lines of code (I didn't know about loops or arrays back then, so I had a lot of repeating code). I eventually ended up making ones for Final Fantasy IV and VI, however those were never released to the public, as I had trouble getting the CRC to calculate properly every time.

This led me down the path I am now, going for my Bachelor's in IST with a specialization in Programming.

My first project, ever, was a very unproud thing that was developed...

A little detail - I was 12 back then.

So, a distant family member had a business of selling things that they brought to the country. They, of course, needed a website and my parents knew that I had some skills in development so suggested them my services.

Discussion started and well, what came out was this:

1. They need a site with items list.
2. It had no actual design plans, no actual requirements, just a list.
3. Oh. It had to work perfectly on IE4 or IE5 (can't remember).

So what was actually done, was a site full of divs, clearfixes and so buggy that opening in any other browser than IE - resulted in a total failure.
We have sat down and I, with all the respect told them that my skills are not sufficient to make all of the browsers work equally (I've been on HTML/CSS for more than 6 months back then. And all of it was after school). They calmed me down and said that it's ok, they can give me as much time as I need to figure things out. Yet, my English wasn't good back then so I couldn't... (I was 12, with 3 years of basic English as a non-native speaker).

We sat around the table, discussed what could be done and if I could investigate that and re-do when I'm fully ready. I agreed. The site was launched for IE only as it worked fine and others were just throwing an error to visit it with IE.

They were happy, people were using it and they didn't say that anything was bad. Of course, management was thru FTP and editing LIVE files because, well, no php, no control panels, nothing... I felt ashamed that the site wasn't what they wanted but they were ultra happy with it - first customers rolled in from there. They paid me around 60EUR at that time (it was ~12 years ago) and I've spent a month there. (minimum monthly wage here was around 90-120EUR at that time...

So, all in all, this project that I still think I failed - pushed me to the world of devs and... I've never regretted it. Of course, when I actually met with them after years - they have dropped the site as it was not needed anymore but they said that it was exactly what they needed and there was nothing wrong, even if it didn't work perfectly.

My first dev project outside of school work was an android application I made for my then-girlfriend to track time between contractions and count kicks during her pregnancy. It was horrifically ugly but it was my first android app and it worked!

[story of your first dev project] - i really think there should be a headline like that for wk rants

Anyways, it was a while back, le college teacher approached my friend and me asking if we wanted to do a project. We said sure, it was a medium sized data analysis project. We got the specs with a lot of formulas, basically implement them all and make a web frontend, thats it. Took like a year but we did it. Few months later teacher is furious because the calculations didnt give him data that he expected (by expect i mean he thought that a distribution formula would accurately yield 200+ data fields from around 4) and blamed it on us. Not the retard other professor who fucked up half of the formulas. Ok.

Back in grammar school we started programming in TI-Basic on a TI89 Titanium as it was part of math class (calculus and geometry). I didn't really understand much because the teacher thought it was a great idea to start with recursively calculating GCD (and we were in a sort of "linguist profile", nobody had ever touched a line of code in their lives before). I still liked it though and by some coincidence I got an old Win95 compaq notebook to play with from a friend.

I started playing around with the CMD prompt and batch files and could apply some of the things I had learned on the TI, like GOTO or If statements. I still didn't know what I was doing of course, and so it happened that I used the > file pipe when trying to compare two values. Suddenly there was a file with some code fragments and I started to get what I had done. I put the file pipe into an endless GOTO loop and was amused how those few lines filled up the whole desktop with nonsense files. I went on to refine this a little so I could control it with another file that acted as a kill switch when present. Over the next weeks I played some more with it and made it write out and start another batch file that would check whether the original script was still there and recreate it if not.

That notebook was so large and heavy I could not bring it to school, so I wrote all code by hand on paper and typed it in when I got home, that way I could still code in class when I was bored and no one would notice.

So my first ever "program" that I wrote myself was some lousy malware.

It was back on 96~97, using Pascal on a 386 for sure. But the program itself was probably a calculator. We want to learn how to make a program that would stay running on background to copy itself for other files, like a virus. But we didn't intend to build one. It was just to learn how to do that.

My first visual came some time later, on Win 95, made in Delphi. It were a music player, something like winamp.

Good times! :)

First real dev project was a calculator for a browser game, that calculates the optimal number/combination of buildings to build. I got bored constantly doing it manually, so I made this program as a fun and useful challenge. It involved basic math, and I did it in VB.

Second one was a stats tracking page for my team in another browser game, that let us easily share and keep track of stuff. It allowed us to minmax our actions and reduced the downtime between actions of different players. HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL.

Third one was a userscript for the same game that added QoL features and made the game easier to play. JS

Fourth was for the first game, also a QoL feature userscript, that added colors/names, number limit validation to inputs, and optimization calculators built in the interface. It also fixed and improved various UI things. Also had a cheating feature where I could see the line of sight of enemies in the fog of war (lol the dev kept the data on the page even if you couldnt see the enemies on the map), but I didnt use it, it was just fun to code it. JS

From there on, I just continued learning and doing more and more complex shit, and learning new languages.

Well I guess my first dev project will probably end up as my last (For good reason).

Not long after dippig my toe in the programming world by messing with Minecraft mods, I decided to take a gamemaking class at my high school which introduced me to gamemaker, straight away I was able to use my java knowledge to sort of become the go to person for help, so while everyone was following tutorials for a basic pac man clone I had started work on the final asignment which was to create a fundamentally playable game.

Taught myself how to use spritesheets, tilesets, external libraries and the like and decided, fuck it lets make an RPG based around looting dungeons, ended up decidng on the title 'Plunder', since then the project grew and grew in scope to the point it is now unrecognisable with my goals as of now compared to then.

Now that project has been placed on hold as the story and world just grew in scope to the point I litteraly do not have the knowledge or time to actually work on the game, so I've started converting that world into a book which is slowly motivating me to almost slice up the game and work on individual pieces.

But considering the drain and effort that has gone into this, pretty sure IF (And that's a big if) I ever do release this game that took basic concept 9 years ago, don't think I would ever be able to top that achievement.

Thankyou for coming to my ted talk.

(Just for shits and gigs I might try and did up some old projects related ot this and post them in the comments if anyone may be interested ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

My first ever dev project was a website I setup with my dad, it was for my uncle's company. 😃

You can barely call it a dev project because we did it in WordPress and the only thing we touched was a bit of HTML and a bunch of CSS 😅,
but it was really fun working together with my (programmer) dad and it motivated me to study programming as well.

The site turned out ugly as fuck, but the standards for websites are very low where my uncle is from so that wasn't a problem. 😊

I earned 90€ and bought myself a new mouse (Logitech G502), which I still use now 4/5 years later. 😎

My first software.. Okay. So first time I ever attempted was with my father, i was around 8 or so, i remember very little from it, but in nutshell, i somehow ended up at his job having day off school or something, no idea.

Apparently he was bored, so he decided yo show me... Basic. Yep, thats right. Frking basic. Anyway, he shown me some really basic stuff in basic, and pushed the envelope really hard, just trying to force into me more and more in these 8hrs. I started with filling screen with "o" characters. Most of times he was telling me what to write with elaborate explanation why. At the end of the day, we finished with simple maze game where player was "o" and maze walls was #. Without any goal, or anything.

Next day i was at point 0, understood nothing from it except how to handle keystrokes (and belive me, that for me was huge mindblow, and even bigger mindblow that it actually made prefect sense).

I dont remember much, but later i started with father-assisted c++ and some pascal. I immidietly loved c++ but dropped learning it for (NullPointer) reason.

Thats not really project imho, so now time for my actual first project.

It was about time when ARK survival evolved was a fresh thing, i was playing it a lot. Server admin became buddy. We all complained about max level cap, but to change it in config you needed to input whole new xp curve.

At that time i had great familiarity with google and computers, some thought i was some kind of PC god (seriously I heard someone saying so about me lol) just becouse I could ressurect most cases of broken windows. And I had next to zero programming expirience. It was about to change. I made first c++ actual program, that was making xp curve for you. It took me just bearly 2 days and was series of cin, cout, one file open, some maths in loop, and done. Maths was very bad. But i pushed it into steam forums, and one guy responded how.bad my math was, so we colabed on making 2 iteration. Took around week. Than half a year passed and we wanted go big. Go gui. I had no freaking idea how making gui looks like. Community liked my cli tool, we had quite a lot of downloads, why not go GUI. And thats when I discovered QT framework. And we had few features in mind... It took us half a year to make it. From 60 lines of code i jumped into 1k lines of code. We pushed it and immidietly started working on 4th version with much greater customizability etc.

Than i finished 18 and found a job. Job in php. I got it becouse I made this project.

Now project is abandon. This project also gave me a lesson that donations will not feed you.

Edit: and before you think about my father that he was nice person to show me code, trust me, i dont know bigger dick than him.

With one of my best friends during university years (9 years ago) we thought about a simple wysiwyg online platform (before WIX or others) to create simple sites . We started working on it , during multiple nights , we got a working demo (we got a nice intership with it ) the problem ... it was written in FLASH (AS3) witch died 2 years after . So the project died with it . I've learned alot.

Website for a gallery that wanted a 10k website for just 1k ... Must haz super CMS so that they could send me word documents each week so I could manuallly copy paste that shit into the CMS, and somehow extract and restore the lowres embedded images in full resolution ...

I guess it was safe to say this was my first client from hell 😅😂😂😂

The second was a website for some ballroom dude that got my referral from gallery X ... Yup, same shitty type of client

It was on my first year of university. I had to develop an administrative system for a tattoo studio.

But practically the only I did was consulting to db and saving information 😅 and the girl who was the owner of the studio told me that using the system was a wasting of time. It was easier to her do those things handmade

But I learned a lot from that experience

My first dev project was written on Visual Basic 5. I think I wrote a keygen to generate serial numbers based on hardware ID.

I was really bad in physics and we had energy, force and all that stuff, when I got to C, my very first programming language. I learned the formulas by writing a program calculating all the stuff we learned about in school.:D

Back then I didn't have a computer and wrote the code on paper before actually compiling it at my moms computer.

It was a little Java Swing Application for my friend who had to maintain a little notebook for his insulin values.
The device he used to read his values, saved them as a csv-file, so it was pretty easy to map them to a readable format, so he didn't have to maintain that notebook.

He never used the App. He got an implant that manages it for him.

In college doing A2’s, working solo. Building a companion app for Trivial Pursuit bet you know it edition. Laptop got hit by virus/malware, stopped me from copying files, lost 2/3’s of my project 3 days before submission.

A record system containing student's information. A project given by my teacher so that I could get the "Best in Computer" award in my school. He helped me to get that award because my school was unfair in giving chances for other students not in the top class to get the award. Unfortunately, I didn't pass it on time. Even if I was the highest in computer in my level, I didn't get the award just because they never gave me a chance

First internship during college,
Made a website using Java EE,
It was a food delivery website with dashboards for website admin and restaurant managers
Learned Java EE, Hibernate and some Frontend and how to manage it all together..
The Frontend was written in JSPs.
I would not do that again.

It was a nice learning experience :)

10 PRINT "Hello world"
20 GOTO 10

Aside from simple programs I wrote by hand-transcribing code from the "Basic Training" section of 3-2-1 Contact magazine when I was a kid in the '80s, I would say the first project I ever undertook on my own that had a meaningful impact on others was when I joined a code migration team when I was 25. It was 2003.

We had a simple migration log that we would need to fill out when we performed any work. It was a spreadsheet, and because Excel is a festering chunk of infected cat shit, the network-shared file would more often than not be locked by the last person to have the file open. One night after getting prompted to open the document read-only again, I decided I'd had it.

I went to a used computer store and paid $75 out of pocket for an old beater, brought it back to the office, hooked it to the network, installed Lunar Linux on it, and built a simple web-based logging application that used a bash-generated flat file backend. Two days later, I had it working well enough to show it to the team, and they unanimously agreed to switch to it, rather than continue to shove Excel's jagged metal dick up our asses.

My boss asked me where I was hosting it, as such an application in company space would have certainly required his approval to procure. I showed him the completely unauthorized Linux machine(remember, this was 2003, when fortune 500 corporations, such as my employer, believed Ballmer's FUD-spew about Linux being a "virus" was real and not nonsense at all), and he didn't even hesitate to back me up and promise to tell the network security gestapo to fuck off if they ever came knocking. They never did.

I was later informed that the team continued to use the application for about five years after I left.

My first dev project was back in the 80's. I might have been around 10, I think.

My friend and I had been tinkering around Shoot'em up construction kit for a while, plus we'd been quite inspired by all the cracktros, intros and whatnot was popular back then (piracy was huge, at least on the C64 platform - I don't think I ever saw an original game until my parents bought an Amstrad CPC).

Anyway, we were inspired. We didn't know how to code except some basic BASIC (ba-dum-tsj). We borrowed a book from the library on how to code an assembler for the C64 in BASIC, and coded for days. I eventually lost interest, but my buddy did actually complete it.

The first dev project, like real dev project, I participated in was a school one and it was double.
The class was meant to make us learn about the software's life cycle, so the teacher wanted us to develop a simple, yet complicated, thing: a Web platform to help tutors send/refer students to the university services (psychologist, nutriologist, etc) and to keep track of them visits.
We all agreed on it being easy.
Boy were we so wrong.
I was appointed as dev leader as well as some others (I was the programming leader, the other ones were the DB guy and the security guy) and as such I was in charge of the technology used (well, now we all know that the client is the one in charge of that as well as the designer) and I chose Django because we had some experience with it. We used it for the two projects the teacher asked us to do (the second one was to find a little shop and develop something for it, obviously with the permission and all that), but in the second one I decided to use React on top of Djangl, which ended being a really good combination tho.
So, in the first project, the other ones (all the classroom) started to discuss and decided to use some other stuff like unnecessary carousel for images, unnecessary functions, they created mock ups for stuff that was never there to begin with, etc. It was really awful, we had meetings with the client (the teacher) with updates on the project, and in not a single one he was satisfied with the results. But still, we continued with the path the majority chose and it was the worst: deadlines were not met, team members just vanished until the end of the semester, one guy broke his leg (and was a dev leader) and never said a word not did anything about the project. At the end, we presented literal garbage, the UI was awful, its colors were so ugly because we had to use the university official colors, the functionality was not there, there literally was a calendar to make appointments for the services (when did the client ask for that? No one knows), but hey, you could add services and their data to it, was it what the client wanted? Of course not! What do you think we are? Devs?
Suffice to say that, although we passed with good grades, the project and the team was shit (and I'm counting me in)
The good part is that the second project was finished by me and it looked really good, yet it didn't matter, the first project was supposed to be used by the university, but that thing was unusable.
Then, in the subsequent vacations I tried to make pretty and functional/usable, yet I failed because I had a deadline for another thing I had to do, but hey, the login screen looked amazing!

Well, my first project was to replicate something I saw somewhere: connect a pen to a potentiometer and to the serial port of an Apple II in such a way that you could replicate the movement of the pen on screen and also draw.

Apple II . Mouse, touch screens, tablet, etc didn't exist.
It worked.

However, a part from feeling old, I feel also stupid now, because I didn't understand at all the potentiality of such a tool nor what was going to happen in few years.

I could have invented a mouse. Or the concept of GUI. It was just in front of me.

Instead, I think I just draw some tits an some dick.

So I'm here.
Wondering, what is there now in front of my eyes, that I don't see?

Never got finished (the personal one of course)...

i started with Python 2 on Codecademy (way back before it became pay-to-play garbage) and it was... eh... it was okay. Not great, reading a book would've been more informative, but it was better than nothing.

I then made basic RNG wrappers and thought I was hot shit. For, like, 4 years.

Then I found out how to manipulate files, and took off from there. That was the moment I really took to it and i've never stopped since.

Thinking back, it’s pretty terrible how long it took to create my first real development project.

When I was the ages of 13-18 I built websites on and off but I would never consider them good enough. I would literally design a bunch of images and then, using just HTML, put all the images together like a puzzle using exact pixel locations. Might be fine and dandy now but back then it would look great on my monitor but on others it would be an absolute mess.

Anyways, after that I got in college and started learning C++ and did assignments but I don’t count those as my own either. Not until I was 29 (my current age) did I finally develop a program assigned by my internship. Prior to that I always just re-learned C++ over and over again off and on because I had no clue where to go after that.

Apologies for the long intro. So the first development project that I feel is legit at my internship I had to use my companies API to track the amount of time it took for them to encrypt a packet and then decrypt it as well as grabbing the packet and seeing how long the hash was, the letters used in which position and so on. Essentially grab a whole bunch of statistics from their software and then output it to an excel document. It had a menu, and I had to make it work on Windows, Ubuntu, Raspbian, and some other systems on different devices.

I was actually really proud of what I ended up with and they use it to test their new versions and compare and so forth.

My first real own project outside of school was a drinking game written in Java. It had a ugly af GUI where you HAD to put in 5 names and 5 drinks because I didn't knew about storing objects in lists or arrays nor about checking for empty string when trying to access the string value that would be put in there by reading the empty input field. So I had 5 variables each for names and drinks. Then u would click on an button and it would randomly decide who had to drink which drink and how many sips between 1 to 5. Only played it ones at a party where I downloaded eclipse so that I could start my program because I knew shit about compiling into an executable file.

There were two of them, not sure which was completed first. One was malware, the second one -- admin tool.

These were the early XP days

1. A batch [windows] script to ease system users' mgmt. Nothing fancy, just multiple calls to usercontrol. My dad needed it for work, and there, it was born. To extend further I made it into an exe file w/ some icon. I felt very proud of it :)

2. I have already told a story of this one at dR. Anyway, it was also a batch script. Except that it was more advanced. Basicaly it was a trojan. Once executed it discovered all that computer's ip addresses and uploaded them to an ftp. Then - pulled a headless radmin installation and initiated a silent install of radmin server. Added radmin server's executable to autolaunch list so that it would come up after reboots. Once done - uploaded SUCCESS status to my ftp. And then all I had left to do - pick an ip from my ftp and enter it into radmin client's CONNECT window. I had a full controll of over a dozen of pcs

From the abandoned university my first dev project came from the course of programming 1(C as language).
I had to implement a robot that moves inside any matrix like map following both specified rules and random moves, and had to reach sooner or later the exit place of the room.

At first I was overwhelmed by the task at hand, then I had to calm myself and start hacking around to get any idea on how to even understand what's required to get to that point.

It obsessed me for the whole first 2 weeks, but the progress was quiet steady.

Then I hit a fundamental problem of state and movement of the robot... And, as always, the best thing to do at this point is to simply detach your attention from the issue|project.

In the same day my mind asynchronously bursted a solution to my problem, and after some time I came back to the project and accomplished it with 100% of the requirements met 😁

This is what it looked like in the console(minified here):

3333333
3000003
3000003
3003003
3003003
4003023
3333333

Guess which is which 😉

My first project was a batch/visual basic script that could do a few things. Open and close CD trays, show a fake virus pop-up, log off, and some other misc stuff.

My second script was a 1 line batch script with vbs generated from itself. It would fuck up your system, put itself in startup, try and replace Explorer.exe with itself, show stuff on screen, reboot it, put itself in strange places so it could be run of the user did something like access Windows features. Never used it but it was fun to make

!dev
#pragma topic Path of Exile
Grinded 5 days with another guy to finally get today our six linked star forge, shaper melted like a piece of butter in a steel furnace. Beautiful wrapup to a great lan party and now back to the real grind, php and c#.

package bar;

public class Foo {
public static void main(){
System.out.println("Hello, World!");
}
}

I still wonder why I didn't start with Python, print('Hello, World') is a god damn one-liner

First dev project? In Holland we had a social media site back in the day called CU2. You could put in your own html/css and style your profile the way you wanted.

For professional work it was a landingpage for a healthcare related page.

This is the first project that I remember. There were probably others before it, but nothing really stands out before this.

My buddy and I got an Independent Study together in high school. Our goal was to write a video game. We harbored no illusions that it was going to be the best game ever or anything, it was supposed to be a project that taught us enough to move on to something else later.

Our chosen tool for this endeavor was Flash 4.0, back before Adobe bought Flash. I don't know why we thought it would be a good idea to do this. I think it was because we could let Flash handle all the graphical stuff and we could focus on the behavioral side.

I don't really remember much about how the project turned out other than we both learned a lot about what not to do.

Luckily, the teacher overseeing our Independent Study felt that the lessons learned were more important than the product, so we got high marks.

There were probably odd bits and peices before this, but the first one I did with a friend must have been a "password cracker" to attempt to crack MD5 hashed passwords. Was simple as anything, but worked quite effectively.

In college.
Created event registration site with jQuery and Material design.
I had no web dev knowledge

My first dev project was back in the third grade. I made a simple (and hideous) HTML website. No CSS, no JS, just plain old (and I mean old) HTML.

Showed my whole class, there was much awe and wonder.

</end story>

My first project was a veterinary web app ( CRUD ) in a really small company, supposedly to replace the clients junk software, the client was a friend of the money guy of the company, after 18 months doing whatever the client asked, and monthly demos, that fucker said I don't like it, I wanted something equal to what I have been using just with internet connection.
At the same time there was other project to create the workflow of commercial orders with other friend of the money guy ( lol...) But in this case the guy was the salesman, Almost same history. When the technology director and the investor asked the sales guy he said " the client said he is not going to pay a shit, there are a lot of free apps for something like this", of course both of them got fucking mad and blamed us, they invested more than 3 millions ( Mexican pesos ) and got nothing in return.

my first project was a star trek themed text based rpg adventure. it was a hell of spaghetti of if queries and gotos in gw basic. later these kind of things got something like an ui.

my first experience was my father doing mandelbrot sets from a magazine and i was watching building them up green pixel for greenpixel on an 8086 pc. it was raining outside and i was sitting in an arm chair with a warm blanket. this cozy feeling remains until today and might explain my personal attachment for this topic.
fortunately his failed attempt to introduce me into programming doing a morsecode translator did not stop me for long.