My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.

I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.

I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.

So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.

I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.

That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.

After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.

In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.

A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.

But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

No, my family did not support me.
They complained about everything.
From how "Python was demonic" to how "Working with computer wont save you from the coming tribulation"

Growing up in a religious cult sucks.

My parents don't charge me for rent and I also eat their food.

My family didn't support me. In fact, my own father told me I'd never learn to code. I do many things out of pure spite, one of them: pursue a master's degree in computer science to prove an old man wrong.

On my third semester of my bachelor's I was already a better developer than he will ever be 🙄

My sister is the one who got all the support, despite her now working as a cleaning lady, having 2 kids of her own, having already married and divorced, having been in financial trouble several times, oh and she's only 22 years old. She couldn't finish high school and even getting a driver's license wasn't without hoops. Now she's dating someone as old as our mother.

I've been putting my career front and center in everything. I want to make my own business and sell a network-oriented Linux distribution through it. My mother was impressed when her colleague whipped up a basic website for their company. You can imagine the surprise when I told her that that's only one component of my infrastructure. My family and I still aren't on very good terms, but yeah.. going from "don't stare at those "screens" all day long" to "wow, you've actually done something with these screens" (to her all technology is a screen) is at least some progress I guess.

No support whatsoever though, neither in my endeavors in programming, server administration and whatnot (but hey what can I expect) but what annoys me the most is that my sister did get all the help in the world for maintaining her general household. I didn't get any of that, first night when I moved into my apartment I slept on the floor because my bed wasn't completely built yet. Now that all of that is done, I don't consider my mother very welcome in my apartment actually...

Oh well, we've gotten where we are somehow at least. Just reading, reading and reading more manuals. That's all you need really.

"Family support you got becoming a dev"

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA

Ahem.
No.

I'm in college now, and my mom sometimes helps me when I get stuck finding a bug in my code. She has a degree in CS, even though she barely used it, so she understands the basics. It's like a rubber duck, but better, because she can ask me questions, and answering them often leads me to the answers. She also listens to me go on and on about random topics I'm learning, even though she isn't interested... basically, she's great!

My family supported me all the way. Not per definition by buying me stuff but they always 'pushed' me to do what I love doing and I am now doing that!

But, I'm a huge privacy/cybersecurity freak and my family mostly migrated to Signal and stuff like that so that's awesome :)

Jira sucks. It's slow af.

about 18 years of "oh, you made this? that's nice, but don't you want to do/learn something you'll actually get paid for instead?" as a reaction to any game prototype i made and showed them. until i got my first programming job. after that, silence and pretending the previous 18 years never happened (except the since forever running "joke" of "oh, you're not going to finish it anyway").

also, the one time i begged my (dtp/graphic artist) mom to draw me some backgrounds for my game, because at least one time in my life i wanted to not have to work on a thing completely alone, it took about three months of begging and convincing, upon which she finally said "ok, i'll try", and after another month, and one unfinished image that i estimate took about an hour to make, she told me "sorry, i don't think i can make what you need".

also some years of having "maximum 2 hours of computer time per day, unless it's the weekend" rule.

Yeah. Kinda late to the WK 227 party.

Thing is: I've read a lot of rants and honestly, some of the rants were ... touchy.

Like that weird emotional thingy you don't like but that just kind of happens cause I'm human too.... And have that shitty emotional feature integrated, which feels most of the time like a heisenbug.

Me and my parents. Specifically mom. Are like ... Matter and antimatter.

You don't want them in a room. Bad things happen TM. My mom is responsible for ... Let's say severe psychological trauma starting with age 4 to age 17.

In 17 I moved out and lived on "my own" (truth: on heavy support, cause I wasn't what you'd called "psychologically stable" at that time).

I fucked up university and - as shared before - thanks to an math teacher who made my life an even more living hell and my parents, I'd started in IT mostly out of "resisting" certain assertations being made over my life.

The support I got from my family can be put together in one sentence:
"I survived, I tolerated - but will never forgive".

Thing is: Be it IT support or anything else. If your gut feeling tells you that family / coworkers / friends are not good for you.

Stay the fuck away from them till you've sorted yourself out.

I can tolerate my parents nowadays. Took > 10 years and a lot of hardships to "achieve" that.

It's not peachy. It's not loving. It's tolerance. (Yeah. That bit is muey importante to me).

The thing is: I cannot deny the fact that my parents tried to support me by money. That's what they still do _nowadays_ even though my income is like 60 % of the income my father and mother has combined... It's a bothersome detail.

There's a certain thing in this rant that I would like "to pass on": Emotional support matters.

When you let someone feel like an empty shell, you cannot fix it with money.

It will - severely - destroy the person.

TLDR: We all have rough edges, can be hard to deal with and be a pain in the arse, but all of us need emotional support sometimes. That's what matters the most. ;)

My papa was financing my first university education. After 4 years in electrics&electronics engineering, I had 2.1 GPA and was not ready for life.

I reapplied for university exams and earned right to computer engineering dept. Papa supported my decision for whole new education after a brief talk and financed me for the second time.

Thanks father.

I had good support.

I got access to a computer at 10 when my mother brought home the ones they used for education to avoid them being stolen

That was a couple of sinclair ZX80

I the got to go to 5 different programming courses over the next 4 years before being able to get a summer job at 14 to by my own spectravideo 128.

At 1) I started teaching through mother job and at 18 I wrote my first commercial program for my father.

I am now 50 and still in the business:)

My mom (a single mother who had to feed 4 kids) feed me, let me stay in her house (at least until I was 21) and let me use the motorcycle.
Instead of running away and giving up her children to child institution (because that's probably what I will do being a selfish person that I am)
If that's not support, I don't know what that is anymore.
It might not be much but at least it gave me the time to grew up and be independent to pursue my dream of working in IT.

Her strength and toughness facing the hard life is also the main inspiration for me to keep going, to prove that I can do whatever I want if I put enough effort on it.

Me: I majored in Computer Science & Engineering
Someone: Are you the eldest son of your parents?
Me: Yes, why? and How did you know?
Someone: Your parents must have forced you to study CSE, right?
Me: No! They never forced me! I chose CSE by myself, because I loved science & technologies
( and a long boring conversation between me and someone, which is not that important )

In my country, usually parents force their children to become something they want ( Though, my mom still says from time to time, "I really wished, one of children to be a Doctor", as my siblings are also not interested to become Doctor :/ ), but my parents never really forced me anything like that, which I'm really thankful for.

Family support? What's that?

I have a complicated relationship with the rest of the fam, so I have been avoiding talking to them for a few years now, and it's not like they've been dying to contact me either. Except for mom, who would sometimes give useful insight. The rest, no support, work-wise or not.

Parents: You want anything for your birthday?

Me: yeah, can I have a newer PC

Parents: Cool

Me: Also, can I spend a majority of my time alone messing with it?

Parents: Sure

My parents were really laid back and basically let me do what I wanted

My dad let me use how computer and have me a VB6 book when I was like 5.

I took it from there though it seems it tube in the family.

Dad's a Dev
I'm a Dev
My younger brother is also a Dev
My mom is QA, though used to be maintenance dev I think

well... my father doesn't bother about anything regarding me and supporting me financially or anything, and I broke up the contact with my abusive mother ~3 years ago, so... I can't really say they supported me haha...

My mom said I can be whatever I want so I became a front end dev

My dad got us a a home computer on ~1995 without video games. But he brought a software where we can program our own games. So, we learn programming.

My family “supported” me going in the field of technology but associated it with IT as most families do, so any attempt to show them stuff I’m messing with ended with them not being impressed or excited just the vacant “oh that’s cool” never asking me about it or anything like that.

They just saw I was happy and were supportive in that way which I suppose I can appreciate.

No one in my family has ever been a developer. No one understood what a developer does so I just was labeled the one who knows about computers. Thankfully my immediate family was ok with me studying computers and I wasn't pushed to be a doctor or lawyer like most stereotypical ones do.

actually, I'm reposting to this week's rant (Family support you got becoming a dev?) because I remembered some stuff. and also because reading other people's rants reminded me of stuff. The fam and I have changed dynamics, but there is a ten-ish year span that we kinda got along, and I constantly forget about it. (because what good does nostalgia do?)

So, about the fam support.
Parents were both devs. Engineers, to be specific. So yeah, I was around the material all the time. but I was not specifically interested and they didn't push it. (They were busy with other dramas in fam and society) I was more of a bookworm. an imaginative kid, who liked to spend time either reading a fantasy book, swim, play basketball or hang out with her friends. The whole programming thing came way more natural to me than one could imagine. Me getting into uni for it was pure luck because I didn't have the grades for the other thing I wanted. (which, thank fuck, I'm doing way better now) So yeah, the support was not really required. Except for food-clothing-shelter combo.

I did want to become an astrophysicist as a child tho, which they didn't really support. Bummer.

My parents (mom and grandma) helped me buy my first PC. I had some money saved from mowing lawns and they supplemented the rest. Mom, a library director, got a bunch of DOS and Assembler and BASIC books and encouraged me to teach myself.

That turned into computer camps and helping with tech at the library and school. That turned into a computer science and aerospace scholarship to college where I learned C and Unix.

That turned into a degree in business information systems and a career in web development.

19 more years to go and I can retire.

When I was 6yo I was playing next to my dad with his old PC on a good old CRT a game called “Sperms” where you catch sperm with condoms and every time you do it made a really loud “YIPPIE” sound. I was playing this game for 4 years.

Somewhere around when I was 10 my dad told me we should build a PC and I was asking “Why does everyone has to make their own PC?”, I didn’t yet know what an cheap ass my dad is, so we did. Had a lot of fun and was very scared of the PSU, like really scared.

It blew up a few months later because I switched the toggle on the back from 220v to 110v, and got even more scared of PSU’s until I started an electricians apprentice.

Anyways, one day my dad and I where at a friends place and I played Tux Racer on his super loud Maschine that would crash if you kept the side door of the table closed, it ran some kind of Linux and I was fascinated how “simple and clean” it looks. I got a mini-cd to install it at home and immediately was hooked because the windows installation was such a pain in the arse those years. I did that all by myself just because I also wanted to play Tux Racer at home.

Anyways, somewhere right before GTA IV came out I started with VB.Net and ever since I was totally hooked and spend more time doing that than actually going to school.

My dad didn’t care and just let me do this, my mum just made sure I would have been up at least after the first lession, I don’t miss the bus and that I went to bed in a timely manner, which never happened because the PC was in my room and my mum slept downstairs and couldn’t notice that I was doing script kiddie things after an hour or so of “sleeping”.

So yeah, they didn’t care and were happy I didn’t annoy them.

Actually I didn’t wanted to become a developer because I always wanted to have it be a hobby or something and I liked woodwork more, but then people more qualified than me were more stupid than this script kiddie that still just wanted to play Tux Racer. That’s it.

At first, my family was like "Don't waste your time on the computer, in college, you will learn how to code". I didn't listen, I started learning C#, but somehow I ended up learning C++ lol. Then I started with C, assembly, and SystemVerilog.
After they saw how good I was at it. They started supporting me. I don't blame them for not supporting me at first, they were ignorant about the topic, so they were blindly making assumptions.

My parents didn't mind. Since childhood, they used to tell me that I can choose my profession freely. I tried with medicine. Burned lots of €s and lots of time. And then switched to IT. Parents did not get in my way - on the contrary, helped me wherever they could. And allowed me to shoot my own foot whenever I was so stupidly determined to.

I believe it's the best kind of parenting -- allowing your children to make their choices, their own mistakes and learn from them while suggesting a piece of advice along the way.

I propably mentioned it in an earlier rant but my father was a programmer, my grandfather was a programmer, and thus my son shall be too.

Family support (2 phases)

When I was younger my mom bought me a 486 from the cow spotted company.

I didn't do much development as being kinda isolated in computer land didn't really make that easy to understand / do, but I messed with everything else.

At that time (somewhere near the invention of the wheel) just exposure to computers really gave a huge leg up on getting into tech.

Moving on until MUCH later in life I was working in tech, often with developers, but not in development. That company was acquired by an overseas company, the head of the new company appeared on the white house lawn and Trump said this would be great for America jobs ... so of course they laid a huge number of people off just before the acquisition.

I was kinda done with that corner of the industry, no matter how good you are / who you work for it was an area that just sort of decays in in importance. I'd go visit the developers and they'd share their excess free lunches they got each day.

Then I'd go back to my corner of the offices and read an email about how the quarterly crappy ass pizza party (that maybe cost a couple hundred busks) was called off due to "cost cutting".

By this time I've got a family and kids, and I decide to take a chance at starting a new career and they were kind enough to go along with my "sleep, care for family, school, care for family, code, sleep" lifestyle for a number of months.

And it worked out.

Family... I respond with song title:
Boulevard of broken dreams.

Our paths don’t cross anymore. I don’t know why. I don’t want anything from them cause I know the consequences (maybe that’s why). I am not missing them and they’re not missing me so I think it’s a win win situation.

My family absolutely did not support me. Throughout my life my parents wanted me to become an accountant (like my sibling) and encouraged me to pursue that. In 8th grade I initially broke the news that I wanted to get into software development and was told "computers won't be around for another 10 years (this was probably around 2010), don't go into something so stupid". For reference, we had 1 family computer up til 2008 which we had limited amounts of time with.

Every year after, up until the end of 12th grade I told them I planned on going into software dev, and they got angrier each time, before finally they stopped speaking to me for a short time over that summer after I told them I had been accepted into university for computer science.

Now, in my final year, they still think i'm throwing my life away. Their disapproval is what has been motivating me the most, to prove to myself that I can support myself and create good things.

I got their financial support to pursue higher education in CS and move abroad.
However, I've never really got their constant emotional support. Each decision I was taking, I always had to prove myself, which can be tiring and unmotivating, since I'm expecting uncoditional love and support from my parents, not an interview and a selling pitch for myself every time I tell them something

Learning from the smart people; in every workplace there are drones and leaders, each have their own selective intelligence. Pick the ones that are the most intelligent to learn from, and you'll be going along happily while learning at breakneck speed from the best.

I got into development only a short time ago.

My mother paired up with a partner who was a dev making some serious cheddar when I was just barely not a teenager anymore, while I was working shitty low-wage customer service gigs.

Honestly, the only reason either of them could give me for doing it was the money.

A couple years went by, I was extremely fortunate: found a job within 6 weeks of finishing a year-long program at the local technical college which only yielded me a basic cert. By that time, my mother's partner had long lost their job, and I had paid their rent (twice my own) on two separate occasions. I went from usually having about a hundred dollars after bills to last me until next paycheck to five times that.

A couple more years go by, I'm doing pretty well supporting my own family now (my wife and child, not anyone else) and somehow doing way better now than the people who spurred me ever did. I no longer have a reason to compulsively check my bank account out of worry that I'm overdrawn.

Now I'm locked in an endless battle in my mind to find a correction for every flaw in my life, or at the very least a workaround. I go to bed and wake up thinking about the same things: my work. Buuuutttt.... My family has everything they could ever need and more.

So I guess I could say the support I got from my family was:
* an initial nudge in the "right" direction
* a reality check on what the industry can be like
* a sentence to eternal damnation by changing my paradigm on everything

They were fucking not. I used to get shouted at because I spend too much time infront of a computer. But funny enough everything was fine as soon as I started making more money than my parents while still being in high school. Now they take credit for my success but back in the day I needed to fight with them in order to get few hours of pc time.

Not a whole lot. But when I was 9 I started trying to fix an old Compaq computer that my parents replaced. I never actually got it to work but I did tear it apart and put it back together. Eventually a friend's parent gave me a a Dell that didn't work. Figured out it just needed a new HDD. Around that time my dad (who is literally the textbook definition of technically challenged) got a old textbook about computer hardware from a friend of his that was a bit of a hobbyist. This was in maybe 2006. The book was from 1988. I don't remember the name but it's somewhere in my parents house still. I didn't get much out of the book. Time passed and I started building computers. For myself, the local library, my friends. I ended up going to college for business while building computers on the side. I was making pretty good money for the amount of time I put into it. Eventually I ended up switching careers. My parents didn't really help me get into software but they offered encouragement. And a book from 1988 about computer hardware... So that's something.

Family support for becoming a dev?
HA! None at all.
Well, to be fair, my parents bought their first a PC in 1996 for learning how to use it and to write documents for business.
So it was a rather passive support, if at all.

In React, OOP is now the old way of approaching react.js everybody doing functional programming/functional components.. this that the future ???

Family? What's that? 🤔

If anything they made me go to my room/corner because I couldn't stand them and I was always on the PC because I could distract myself from the local environment. 😢

Family wasn't very supportive of my first choice (Film Directing) and since I live in Latin America and both of my parents come from very poor families, they pushed me to engineering in order to make money and live a better life than they did.

Even though it was not my initial call and they were not very supportive of my first choice, once I started CS they gave me everything I needed to keep on studying.

Overall, I think that for a lot of coders out here from third world countries, we can agree that engineering was not our first call, but it's mostly a way to get out of poverty and into a field that gives you advantages over others.

Shout out third world country ranters!

I don’t remember exactly how old I was when my dad gave me the BASIC manual that came with his IBM XT. What I do remember is that he took it away shortly after I figured out how to put the beep command inside a for loop.

Yes, after an initial period of scepticism they did.

I was incredibly well supported, both morally and financially, and I'm incredibly grateful for it. It's a very fortunate position that many don't have the luxury of experiencing, and I've no doubt it helped immensely - especially in earlier years.

After reading mostly sad (and astonishing!) stories, I didn't really want to share my story.. but still, here I am, trying to contribute a wholesome story.

For me, this whole story started very early. I can't tell how old I was but I'm going to guess I was about 5 or 6, when my mom did websites for a small company, which basically consisted of her and.. that's it. She did pretty impressive stuff (for back then) and I was allowed to watch her do stuff sometimes.
Being also allowed to watch her play Sims and other games, my interest in computer science grew more and more and the wish to create "something that draws some windows on the screen and did stuff" became more real every day.

I started to read books about HTML, CSS and JS when I was around 10 or something. And I remember as it was yesterday: After finishing the HTML book I thought "Well that's easy. Why is this something people pay for?" - Then I started reading about CSS. I did not understand a single thing. Nothing made sense for me. I read the pages over and over again and I couldn't really make any sense of it (Mind you, I didn't have a computer back then, I just had a few hours a week on MOM-PC ^^)
But I really wanted to know how all this pretty-looking stuff worked and I tried to read it again around 1 year later. And I kid you not, it was a whole different book. It all made sense now. And I wrote my first markups with stylings and my dream became more and more reality. But there was one thing lacking. Back in the days, when there was no fancy CSS3. It was JavaScript. Long story short: It - again - made no fucken sense to me what the books told me.

Fast forward a few years, I was about 14. JavaScript was my fucken passion, I loved it. When I had no clue about CSS, I'd always ask my mom for tips. (Side story: These days it's the other way around, she asks me for tips. And it makes me unbelievably proud!)
But there was something missing. All this newschool canvas-stuff wasn't done back then and I wanted more. More possibilities, more performance, more everything.

Stuff begun to become wild. My stepdad (we didn't have the best connection) studied engineering back then, so he had to learn C. With him having this immensely thick book for C, I began to read it and got to know the language. I fell in love again. C was/is fucken awesome.
I made myself some calculators for physics and some other basic stuff and I had much fun using and learning it. I even did some game development, when I heard about people making C-coded games for PSP. Oh boy, the nights I spent in IRCs chatting with people about C, PSP-programming and all that good stuff, I'll never forget it - greatest time of my life!

But I got back to JS more and more and today I do it for money and I love it. I'll never forget my roots and my excurse into the C/C++ world and I'm proud to say, that I was able to more or less grow up with coding and the mindset that comes with it.

My wife doesn’t brew me a coffee. So that I will get some sleep 🤪

#bestSupport

No support here. I was doing Communication Studies but spent most of my spare time learning webdev. My parents repeatedly berated me for messing around with it: "You should focus on your studies". Proving them wrong turned out to be THE most powerful drive.

3 years later I nudged my brother in the same direction when he wasn't sure what he wanted to do for a living (with parents' approval).

I'm going to talk about ancient history. When I was getting started with computers, my dad got me a Radio Shack Tandy computer (yes, the ones you had to use a TV as a monitor). The damn thing was broken from the start, I'm not from the US, so returning it and getting a new one wasn't easy.

He managed to find some place to get it fixed, got me started with Basic, and here I am.

Parents were supportive in that they forced me to go to college, but let me do whatever I wanted while there.

Pretty sure they still don't really know what I do.

My family supported it from day 0, as I went to a specialized school to finish "high school".

They do push me towards more studying (I got a bachelor's in computer science), but idk if that's really the right call.

ever since i started working from home i am now able to sing my heart out while coding and argue with myself... my mom walks by me answering my questions "why isnt this working?" and she's like "why are you asking me i dont know" 😬 ok mom

My dad bought me a book on QBASIC when I was around 7 or 8 years old, and within a month I decided I was going to be a game programmer when I grew up. That's not where I ended up, but that's how the journey started. My parents were both pretty supportive of that decision.

my uncle, he presented my first love:

the computer 🥰

No, they didn't supported and infact are source of major problems in my dev and college career. Just granpa and dad, they wanted me to go for government jobs. Whenever they saw me with laptop they will say things like, you are ruining your future, this won't be asked in exams etc. They are good at manipulation too and sadly they won. Forced me to take civil engineering as it makes you eligible for most government jobs. I didn't knew what was going on my mind back then, and why i listened to such peices of shits. Real bad decision.

Well, they were pretty glad I came up with a better plan than acting (I was not that good at it) and the stars aligned for the dev life. The fact that two of my cousins are extremely successful devs probably helped

me: *spends most of the evening coding his new shitty website*
me: *forgets to go to bed*
Da': "I hope you're not becoming game addicted"

My parents weren't very supportive about it at first because they somehow kept (and still are) linking it to game addictions...
But atleast now they accept that I became a dev because I always felt so empty when I was forced to come out from behind my PC and socialize like a "normal" person and talk about "normal" things.

Whoawzerds

Lots and lots of unpaid work fixing their phones, computers, printers and internet. Then a ton of unpaid work making an e-shop for my mother

I became familiar with basics after my mom bought a PC and disc with software which included FirstPage. She wasn't *that* angry getting a $100 receipt for the month of Internet I trafficked - oopsie, thatta large price, even after inflation.

I got enrolled in 'extracurricular activity' in second grade of my elementary school. We were playing some games at first, but later teacher started to show us programming and explained the matter very well considering we all were 8 y olds. I got interested and while others would play games I was coding and solved assignments teacher gave us.

My family thought that computer will make me stupid, thinking it was made just for playing games. They promised me to get me the computer if I had highest grades in school. I did, not all of them but tried really hard to be the best, despite that I waited for years and still being close to have aced every subject in the meantime.

I got my first computer when I was 16.

Since that day I was constantly reminded that I am wasting my life away sitting at this stupid box.

Later when I got the job that was well payed, they acknowledged that they were wrong to do that for majority of my life.

My parents are unable to explain what I do at the job as they were never interested in what I really do. "Something with computers" is most common answer you can hear from them.

My parents are non-technical people and they still don't understand how that box works and God forbid that they buy something online. My father even rejects to use smartphone.

They also thought that I'm no college material despite always being in top 5 students of the year (not class, but whole year).

They had other plans for me, but I was aware of that and didn't gave a f00ck about what they want with my life. I knew what I want and that was all exactly opposite of what my parents would like.

I was not the child they wanted, but was good son, even helped them and worked student jobs to pay some bills and to help them financially and still they struggled so hard to find some flaw to my character and decisions just to make their point but more than often failed miserably and just proved how wrong they were and how they don't think anything trough.

Only one who really supported me was my elder sister as she knew I was doing the right thing! She also did it her way and I am proud of her as both of us were dealing with 2 tough customers.

long rant, but wanted to add one more thing, I was never into sport, but was training tae kwon do and was really into it and was decent at it among my peers. When I was going to national competition, on my way out of the house all I got from my parents was: "why are you even going there when you will immediately loose, is it just to travel a bit?"

TL;DR: my family supported me less in my life than worst phone call you had with IT support at your worse ISP!

Yeah they support their children. And now they saw how good I am (I'm in a project with my father and I help my mother, who is a teacher, daily) even more.

Aah but don't be in the computer so much go get fresh air.