
What started your interest in development? - signals
I think stories about what first piqued a person&#x27;s interest in development are great and can be inspirational - share yours
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a3n
I took a programming class senior year high school, 1975. We programmed via
mechanical teletypes connected to the school district's mainframe via acoustic
couplers where you put a phone handset into the cup things. We "stored" our
programs on paper punched tape, and turned our rolls in for assignments. It
was kind of interesting but it didn't really get me then.

Joined the Navy, did telephones and gyrocompasses. My first job out of the
Navy was for a military contractor, and part of our contract was keeping
engineering studies up to date. All paper based, and if you changed one thing
then you had to flow it all through again, manually, on a new form. Or use
whiteout. It drove me insane.

So I taught myself how to program the department's minicomputer (don't
remember the machine or the language). Now we could make one change and the
program would flow it through and print out a fresh new paper for inclusion in
manual folders. Wheee ha!

I quickly figured out that that was much more interesting than my actual job,
so I quit and went to school.

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lhorie
David Blaine (yes, the magician guy). I saw his first TV show when I was a
teenager and got interested in magic. I started collecting magic secrets that
I found online and built a site to serve as a repository for card sleights-of-
hand.

On my first job at an internet cafe, business was slow, so I took the liberty
of building a website for it. The owner got happy and told some other people
that I could build sites. And then people started paying me to build their
sites. I learned Flash, PHP and Javascript as I went (yes, Flash was big back
then).

After I got a more fundamental grasp on programming, I started to learn about
more advanced stuff on my free time (reading about algorithms, different
programming languages, design patterns, etc).

Now I make a pretty decent living with a interesting job, get occasional
unsolicited job offers, and I have an open source project that people keep
saying they like (
[http://lhorie.github.io/mithril](http://lhorie.github.io/mithril) ).

Moral of the story: I like programming.

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rickarubio
I was working as an IT guy at a TV station in Utah back in 2012. I was
approached one day by the senior graphics designer at the station, who figured
I had too much free time on my hands.

He offered me a challenge:

Build something to parse the weather data we receive in .csv format everyday,
and then display the correct weather background loop for the weather guy.

I took him up on it. I learned enough Java (to be fair, I had taken an intro
to CS class a year or two prior) to cobble together a GUI based program that
would send commands via TCP to the VizRT servers (commercial graphics system
for broadcasters) and that would control which background clip (sunny, rainy,
snowy, etc.) would play. I would read in the .csv file and then extract out
the info I needed to determine which clip to play.

I expanded the program to monitor the VizRT servers. It would ping them and if
no reply was received I would display the server IP, and highlight it in red
to signify an error.

This little side project is what really set me off on the course to learning
programming for real. I started looking into alternative education and learned
about Dev Bootcamp, a coding school in San Francisco.

Long story short I started learning to program ruby on my own, I applied to
Dev Bootcamp, got in, graduated this past March, and I'm now currently on the
job hunt. This entire process took just over a year. I've now won hackathons
in languages I wasn't even taught (objective-c) and I attend a bunch of local
meetups and learn more about programming every day.

I kept a blog for most of this journey, which can be viewed at
[http://www.rickarubio.com](http://www.rickarubio.com) if you'd like to read
more about how I transitioned into programming.

You can also check out my code on github:
[https://github.com/rickarubio](https://github.com/rickarubio)

Or follow me on Twitter: @rickarubio

If you're considering learning to code and being a programmer, now is a great
time to start :)

Feel free to msg me anytime if you'd like help on learning to code in Ruby or
JavaScript!

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MojoJolo
Friendster. It was the time when overlay layouts in Friendster was a thing. I
was in high school that time and I want to impress my friends. I researched
about overlay layouts and found a site where you can download and modify them.
I wanted more, I want an overlay layout for myself. Not just anything that was
downloaded in the internet. I learned that HTML is the way to do it. I studied
HTML through PageTutor
([http://www.pagetutor.com/html_tutor/index.html](http://www.pagetutor.com/html_tutor/index.html)).
It was the best tutorial I found.

After successfully created my overlay layout, I decided to create a website
for our group of friends. I then uploaded it in Freewebs (now
[http://www.webs.com/](http://www.webs.com/)). My teacher saw that site and
ask me to join a competition. I won awards and made it up to 6th place in the
national competition.

That was my realization. I realize that I can do and I want something like
this. I decided to take up Computer Science in college. Learned how to code
and that was it.

Thank you Friendster.

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loumf
1983, 8th grade. I was in wood-shop class and my teacher asked a friend and me
if we'd rather be in "computer shop" (I think we were acting up and he was
sick of us). First program was on a Commodore PET, drawing on the screen via
POKEs to the video area in memory.

Got hooked and for X-mas a couple of months later, my mom got me a TRS-80
color computer.

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jqm
Middle school early 1980's. BASIC in gifted class on a Tandy computer. I don't
remember the model (it had an affixed CRT monitor). I was so impressed that I
saved up all summer and bought a TSR-80 color which hooked to the television.
I think it was like $180 which was all summers lawn mowing money. I was 13. It
was awesome.

I deviated into other fields and although I have been Linux enthusiast for a
long time, finally came back to programming about 4 years ago, first as a
hobby, then as people I knew needed some stuff that I knew I could write,
professionally. I haven't looked back since (although I was making more money
before... I really love programming and don't want to do anything else
anymore... damn you TSR80!)

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amorphous
Around 1983, I went with a friend into an electronics department store. He
typed following lines onto the screen: 10 PRINT "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10. Pressed
run and walked away.

I was immediately hooked. Love at first sight.

I got one of those babies:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTech_Laser_200](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTech_Laser_200)
and since then I'm programming :-)

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the82nddoctor
When I was a little kid in Venezuela, my dad got us our first computer for
home, it ran DOS 6.1 and my mom couldn't get the commands in english. So I
spent a few days writing a translation of it using batch files that would
change "COPY" and "DEL" to "COPIA" and "BORRA". That got me hooked.

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BWStearns
I had a frustrating work environment where we didn't have access to the tools
we needed to do our jobs. We did however have access to a variety of scripting
languages. So i learned to code in order to make the tools we needed and
enjoyed it more than the original job i was doing.

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runjake
That's all there was to home computers at the time. A BASIC REPL. There wasn't
much else to do except play around with it and hand-type BASIC programs from
computer magazines.

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stevekemp
I remember in 1982, or 1983, the family was given a 48k Spectrum, with a bunch
of cassette tapes, for Christmas.

Unfortunately the tape-player was broken, and because this was back in the 80s
in the UK there was basically zero chance of catching the store open and
getting an exchange made until the new-year.

So the new computer enthusiasm was killed in my sisters, and I enjoyed myself
reading the manual, and typing in examples from it, then later games from
magazines, and similar.

That's what fuelled my programming: Typing in code on a ZX Spectrum, then
later writing my own in BASIC and then z80 machine code. From there I
graduated to machine-code/assembly on the PC, Java, C, etc.

I assume I'd have been curious how the black-box worked eventually anyway, but
I do wonder how things would have turned out if we'd had a working cassette
player all those years ago.

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eswat
Making Unreal Tournament mutators in junior high and working on a few mods
after that. Unfortunately I never did much with the game programming stuff
after high school.

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rfergie
I had a book called "Keys to Infinity" which was a kind of odd pop maths book.

It had some code in it.

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NameNickHN
8th grade programming course at school in the 80s. They taught us Basic back
then.

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apolodoro
Write with Wordpress in MS-DOS and hide those documents.

