Where did you start?

When did you first learn to program? When did you start learning about tech? What did you do in your pre-college days?

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Tech in general from fixing broken stuff and programming from trying to be a 1337h@ckz0r and wanting to make games.

> be me
> 12 years old
> homeschooled turboautist
> parents sign up for program that delivers homeschooling materials
> "Here user, pick out some extracurricular books"
> hand me catalog full of books / courses to choose from
> Mostly shit topics, finally find something interesting
> Learn to Make Websites For Mouth Breathing Retards
> book gets delivered
> It's 60 pages tops, font size is probably 36pt
> Open it up, its a book on HTML
> Load notepad on my computer, write my name using HTML
> Use HTML to turn it red (this is before CSS)
> iamagod.jpg
> Pick up a much larger HTML reference manual, follow the examples in that book
> Start lurking on forums
> Also develop an interest in porn
> Free porn sucked ass back then
> Couldnt get premium shit because I was 12
> wanted to learn to hack so I can get good porn and free vidyagames
> Start learning to program
> Become so interested in programming that parents friends give me money to to make them shit for their businesses
> Fast forward...
> I've got good money from tech, decently hot gf, awesome porn is free
> Never did learn to hack anything other than WiFi passwords
> If it wasn't for my insane porn addiction and borderline autism I would never have gotten into programming

>Sup Forums
>did
>pre-college

before Standford started Udacity, they would provide the undergrad Computer Science Course with all material for free.

Mehran Sahamil - youtube.com/watch?v=KkMDCCdjyW8

Jerry Cain - youtube.com/watch?v=Ps8jOj7diA0

I found these brilliant when I first started out learning programming

C64.

learned how to program by trying to make my TI-84 do my math homework for me

i wrote a triangle solver,
shit saved me so much time

Broke my leg on a job-site working as a ship-yard pipe-fitter, got 6 months comp time. Realized my job was too fucking hazardous and didn't think my kids should have to worry about me.
>go to public employment office
>talk with some borderline-illiterate lady who wants to put me in another construction job
>tell her I want something easier on my body
>she smacks her lips and tells me "ebody say they wanna be a computer programmer, maybe you shud do that" and rolls her eyes
>go home thinking im fucked but irritated this ape thinks im too dumb to program
>look up resources online, get a feel for the basics on codecademy and others
>start working on an android app that just loads random catpicks, super simple, googling like crazy to figure out each step
>work on that and similarly dead-easy android/java program for the rest of my comp time
>go back to work to finish out the year but spend my free nights and weekends, after the kids are asleep, polishing those apps
>publish two of them, get about zero downloads but they're up and functional
>someone on 4chins advises me to link them on a website so i host them to show off
>decide to blog a bit about my journey on the website while I update the apps some more, now one of them actually has responsive ui and looks pretty good
>end of the year I quit my job and start applying for jr. java positions
>takes another few months of looking but I land a job doing android
>learn a ton of things on the job I never knew to look up
>get pushed to QA and learn even more about the process
>eventually leave there for better pay at another company
Life's pretty goood. I'm 45 now and was almost 40 when I quit my pipe-fit job. Just now starting to make as much as I was there five years ago but now there is no more risk of my going home in a box because Louie fucked up his weld.

Around 1997 I believe, started with QBasic.

>be 14
>have some buddies on an invisionfree forum who were into rom hacking and stuff
>one of them talks about teaching himself Perl and building a calculator application with it
>another dude talks about C/C++ and some of the cool shit he did with that
>all of it just seems like Greek to me
>years later, remember all the good times we had on that board
>remember their convos about programming and decide that I want to get into it
>spend a month or so learning Perl, write a few shitty programs for myself before moving on
>try to learn C++ on and off for about a year, make some progress but still had a poor grasp of the language
>start college, take some classes on Python and C++, learn that Perl is rarely used in the modern world
Not much more to it, really. A few years after that I learned web dev and made a few bucks off of Odesk.

I still miss my old forum buddies.

1984, Apple iie, basic.
Still pre-college, l never went

helped dad with the curry stand on the street

Windows ME. Blue screen of death every couple of months because of ME and brother not knowing where to find virus-free porn.

Fixing it made me learn a lot about stuff. I waited around getting fucked up instead of pursing a career back when knowing stuff about computers was special. Now I'm another fish in the sea as normies flooded technology for an easy big paycheck.

Such is life.

>What did you do in your pre-college days?
I never had pre-college days since I never went to college.
Don't assume everyone is like you, I actually had the willpower to teach myself and build a portfolio and get a job without going to college for 4 years.

Still can't program more than simple text based stuff in C, but I learned a lot of tech stuff from just tinkering with broken shit.

Hadn't touched programming until I went to college. Heard how good the money was so decided to major in CS.

Are you me?

Sounds kind of like how I became knowledgeable about Windows in general. My parents are absolute retards when it comes to computers, and were convinced that my copy of Diablo 2 was a virus, so I was stuck fixing the computer all the time.

My favorite memory regarding that is asking my dad how Diablo 2 broke the SATA cable connecting the hard drive to the motherboard.

>My favorite memory regarding that is asking my dad how Diablo 2 broke the SATA cable connecting the hard drive to the motherboard.
maybe from you spazzing out and smacking the computer when your video game character died

Nah, they had a thick wooden desk. I would have needed to wedge the desk out from the wall, unplug everything from the tower, pull the tower out, hit it, then move the tower back into the desk, take 30 minutes blindly trying to hook everything up, since I can't really see anything, and then turn on the computer again. So even if I was a spazz that hit things (I wasn't), it would have been WAY more trouble than its worth.

>15 years old
>saw "hackers"
>bought "the doom hacking handbook" the next day because it had hacker in the title
>turned out to be a book about modding doom
>figured fuckit, bought doom. modded for a bit, learned some basic CAD
>got on the internet to share my stuff, the old Prodigy service. some asshole IM bombed me, I thought he was hacker.
>started using progs so much I wanted to make my own, picked up "Visual Basic in 24 Hours" which came with VB 2.0 without compiling functionality
>am now many years into an IT career and the lead developer on a Prodigy recreation/emulation project

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