I’m old (a few years shy of 50), and a second generation professional programmer. E.g.: when I was in kindergarten, my father’s main job was maintaining the COBOL compiler on a particular series of Sperry-Univac mainframes. I grew up in a house where the scratch paper for grocery lists was punchcards because my dad brought home reams of unused ones when they were being thrown out in the early 80s. (Fun fact: with a sharp pencil, it’s totally possible to fit a full D&D character sheet on the back of an unused punchcard)

So for “how did I get started”, I was born into it; I was of the age when you’d get magazines in the mail with code to type in (later, the magazines came with audio cassettes with programs on them). So BASIC initially, then in high school my dad got us a copy of Turbo Pascal and set me loose on that. (Plus tiny TSRs in x86 assembly)

I had a few mid- and upper-level programming classes in undergrad., but was a pure math major, not CS. (so didn’t get any CS theory classes, though I did have a job working for campus networking people) After grad school, I got a job writing code in java and perl for a company you’ve never heard of unless you were in a particular corner of the finance world in the late 90s/early 2000s. I’m now on my third or fourth employer, depending on whether you count a buyout that kept the team intact but moved offices as a change in employer.

My day-to-day coding these days is primarily in python and C++, but in the past six months it’s also included work haskell and go, not to mention sh scripts and the weird groovy dialect used in Jenkins.

Oddly enough, my hobbyist stuff these days has all been HTML+javascript because it just makes simple GUI demos so easy. It’s kind of wild coming from the mid-90s when I was heavily involved in early web stuff at my undergrad school to this new world where javascript mostly works and is a basically sensible language. Recent-ish projects have included a solver for the NYTimes “digits” game, a Mandlebrot set viewer and the “come back for more meeting” timer at breakmessage.com.

Ive been learning for a year. I just want to get change careers because ive hit a cap in my earnings in my current one. The past year has been doing a bunch of fun python projects and javascript, and soaking in as much as I can.

Currently, working on codelabs and learning jetpack compose with Kotlin. It has been very fun learning this and a week in.

i gotta get out of this call center, but im ignoreing all the noise and following what makes me excited to learn, and right now thats android development lol.

Hobbyist, professional, hobbyist.

Started with the VIC-20 shortly after the birth of my son. Ended up teaching a few community association recreational classes, which led to teaching introductory programming (among other things) at a private tech school.

That, in turn led to a few requests for small custom programs, software modifications, etc, and eventually my own freelance programming business doing everything from shop floor work order management to Palm Pilot integrations with, yes, mainframe systems.

When that business failed, I went to work full-time for my only remaining client. When that business was sold, the new owners made it clear that I was dead weight, so I left the field entirely and we moved to our cabin at the lake. (That was also the beginning of 10 years with no internet or cell service at home. Now we have Starlink.)

A decade later, I’m about to retire completely and I’m slowly getting back into it as a hobby.

I’ve always been a bit of a language junkie, but my current focus is on go, mostly because I’d like to better understand what’s going on under the hood in my current favourite language, Charm, which is written in go.

In retirement, assuming I can pull myself away from my shop and my fishing rod, I hope to build an as yet undetermined bit of software that others find useful or contribute to a project.

I started off in 2005 on Neopets. There was a feature that let you create your own custom pages for anything which I thought was the coolest thing at the time. I had to learn HTML and CSS to get started.

Turns out that was way cooler than Neopets. Don’t get me wrong, Neopets is awesome, but I absolutely fell in love with building with code back then. Fast-forward to now, I’m a senior dev at a VC studio helping various startups get off the ground.

I’m a fan of learning and building, so it’s kept me in this career ever since. It’s been fun seeing the times change with all sorts of tech. Am a giant fan of FOSS and love contributing where I can.

Pro and hobbyist. I started by learning Basic back in the late 1970’s. Got a EE with strong emphasis on Analog and DSP. Did analog for test and measurement systems but had to add microprocessors (and EPROMs and RAM) to build the systems that control the analog. For embedded I learned C. For PCs I did Basic, Forth (ugh), Turbo Pascal, Delphi, then C#. I’m heavy into unit testing. I did web development as well, back in 1997 to maybe 2010. Perl, PHP, MySQL, Linux, then Drupal. A lifetime ago.
I can’t tell what I’m working on now (professionally) but hobby-wise I do a lot of arduino stuff and some of it has been a blast. I did an automatic dog food dispenser a few years back that was an amazing tour of engineering your way out of failure. The look on my dogs face when the MK1 version sent a fire-hose stream of dog food across the room was awesome.

I learned my first language around 10-11, which was Lua (or at least Roblox’s flavor of it), because I stumbled into a “script builder” server one day that intrigued me.

People would post really long, confusing chat messages (which I would later learn were Lua scripts), then something would pop into the world in game, on their character, etc.

Turns out, the “script builder” server was running the chat as a constant compiler, executing chat messages against the server, then populating the game with the results. That left little old me in awe, and the people on there were super friendly and helped me learn the language.

One thing led to another, I went to college for CS, dropped out after a couple years and started freelancing. (Wrong choice folks, it was the hard road, I made pennies for my efforts trying to build a portfolio)

Eventually I got hired at my first salaried job, a Django agency as a full stack dev. Got to do some cool work. Hopped around in the agency world (some technical, some marketing), got tired of interacting with clients and doing any frontend work. Now I work on an energy demand/response product, am exclusively backend (and cloud-native), and fucking love my job.

So yeah, it started as a hobby, grew into a passion, and now I do what I love and get paid quite well for it. I also really enjoy building smart home devices.

I consider myself both but I’m progressively leaning more and more professional.

First off, I’m 100% self-taught. I discovered Linux around 2003 and immediately learned, several times, how not to install it and multiple really good ways of destroying data on a hard drive. I have had the open source / Linux bug ever since.

I went to school for CS for about two semesters before I dropped out. I then started off my career in IT of all places, I was a helpdesk IT administrator. About 12 years ago I landed a job where most of my responsibilities revolved around Linux servers and workstations (academic research lab). I started learning more about systems automation and configuration management tools/languages/strategies. This constantly lead me down roads involving reading source code for projects that I used day-to-day when something didn’t go right. This lead to filing bug reports and ultimately making a pull-request here or there to fix my own issues.

Fast forward two jobs and 10 years and I’ve migrated to a role where the majority of my day is writing systems code. Most of it is in Go now but I still maintain a handful of Python/Django applications as well. The majority of the tools I write for work are focused on developer experience, cloud automation and internal CI/CD pipelines. In my personal time, I contribute to a number of open source projects.

I’ve been a professional software engineer in the game industry for 22 years now. I started off in school at first on Apple computers with Basic, then when I got a graphing calculator in school I started writing tools for school work and games on it all the time. After college, I wasn’t sure what sort of software I wanted to work on (dot-com era), but one of my good friends talked me into applying to some game companies. I’ve been in a bunch of different companies since then but right now I’m working on online systems for one of the biggest online games.