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Ask HN: What moment led to you becoming a coder?

4 points by mittermayr ↗ HN
Since many of us will be sitting in our old rooms again, coding away on some Christmas project or another (and I hope this remains respectful to those who aren't at home, or can't be at the moment), I wanted to know what led you to become a coder in the first place? For me, it was Winter Challenge (1991), where, as an overly confident 14-year old, I tried to manipulate my high-scores by changing the EXE (or COM?) file. I broke it, of course. And with no backup disk, I set out to just make another Winter Challenge in Q-Basic. Which, obviously, failed even more so. But many PRINTs and GOTOs later, I had found a hobby that has given back so much over the years. I was curious to hear your stories.

7 comments

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tomcam
1984. I asked my friend how you programmed a game. “In assembly language,” he announced snidely, knowing I wasn’t technical at all. Literally three years later I wrote my own compiler in C with a giant, rich runtime library including a TUI all in x86. Made a living at it. A few years after that I was on the Visual Basic team.

My friend never actually learned ASM. Nor was he ever good enough to get a job as a programmer.

mittermayr
Let me just say thanks for your work on VB. It changed everything for me. I pirated it (I didn’t even know of any place that sold it) from a guy spanned over however many disks it took, and I ran with it. Once I’d realised it was made by Microsoft, I made a note in my career journal at school that I want to work there one day. It took me a good decade, but I eventually got that job in Redmond. Must have been an interesting time in Seattle back then.
tomcam
Working in the VB team was by far the greatest professional experience of my life. The people were lovely and brilliant to a person. Nothing like going to lunch with Tim Patersen or Anders Hejlsberg or Eric Lippert and asking about technical stuff I’d wondered about for a decade.

Congratulations on making it there yourself! What groups did you work in?

mittermayr
Office, a little bit of Lync, video conferencing research, and then competitive intelligence stuff. It did feel like the interesting times had long passed when I arrived (just when Bill Gates left), and often thought about what it must have been like.
ojnabieoot
I really didn’t want to be - I went to grad school for math, and generally disliked the programming I was familiar with (basic C, intermediate Scheme, and a lot of MATLAB). I had written some small games in C and TI-BASIC in middle school, and enjoyed writing algorithms in Scheme, but otherwise found programming tedious and frustrating. I never did it for fun. And as a practical matter I was too ivory-tower to get even a MATLAB job (no Simulink / etc). So although I could program I never considered myself a “coder.”

Fast forward to an analyst gig at a startup that didn’t work out due to an unscrupulous CEO: I ended up homeless and took an entry level C# job. So “economic desperation in 2016” was, unfortunately, the moment.

But it turns out programming in C# is a lot less frustrating than MATLAB! There was a whole world in “practical” computer science that I was completely unaware of.

Later I discovered dependent types and theorem provers, which I suppose means I’ve come full circle. In 2021 I am taking time off to work on a serious Idris project :)

tiernano
For me, it was the commodore 64... waiting for games to load off tape took too long, so I ended up picking up the C64 Basic manual and read though it. It had a load of code samples, so after the game loaded and after i got board, i ended up writing and playing with the code samples. few years later, i got a "proper" PC, got a copy of Borland Delphi on the front of a magazine, and started developing Windows apps there. Then on to C++, VB, VB.NET and now C#... so... waiting times got me into it!
mittermayr
To this day I miss the simplicity of a Delphi exe that just worked everywhere.