3 and 4: I started writing code daily at 14, and got my first software engineering job at 19, so I got a massive head start compared to my peers. At 35 years of age I have 16 years of experience under my belt. I've seen a lot of technologies come and go.
Also ADHD and being self taught means I have my own, weird, probably not very efficient way of learning things that involves a lot of skimming metric tons of information. Ingesting new information is how I keep my brain stimulated. Honestly, I never understood why often learning is an effort separate from the act of using. Why people tend to go on a course, absorb information, then just later use it. They should be interwoven, learn by doing and do by learning.
Also my parents couldn't afford to send me to a real university (I wanted to go to MIT as a kid and I was in the middle of nowhere in Southern Europe), so there's that.
We’re incredibly similar. We’re the same age, started coding and working at the same ages, and both acknowledge ADHD in our lives
I didn’t want to go to university, partly because my parents couldn’t help me and partly because I sucked at learning what I was asked to learn.
In response to the OG OP: Curiosity might kill this cat eventually but it certainly helped my career. Being a perfectionist and intensely curious allowed me to explore and refine my understanding of software production over many years.
16 years in I still often forget just how much I know and often feel like an imposter. I think this is exacerbated by career trajectory taking me away from the coal face of code writing over the years.
Nice, my programming soul mate! :) What did you start with?
I vaguely remember playing around with my father's Borland Turbo C++, but it went way over my head, a quick brush with Visual Basic for DOS, but it started to stick with VB6 first and Visual C++ a bit later, and building small desktop app for my father, an electronic engineer — so it was mostly fields and buttons that sent data over RS-232.
Then the Internet happened, so mIRC scripting, started playing with Linux and one day I stumbled upon on a website about open-source hobby OSes and spent a year out of school (dropped out) smoking weed and working on my own operating system (got up to the point of reading an ELF binary from ext2 and executing it). By that point I was 18, life happened, and I had to find a real, paying job.
And yeah... still feeling like an impostor. Looking for work atm, and I keep wondering if I'm good enough.
VB5 and 6 - AOL phishing and mIRC scripting. Wrote a few practical demos like p2p chat, then got fed up of the distribution challenges inherent in windows runtimes (back in the day) so got into web development via PHP. Now I almost exclusively build web-based software, fullstack.
I needed to get a job too. I was also into modding games. I got rejected from a low-paid game developer contract to make game textures that I could do in my sleep - I thought I was doomed. Then I got a break at a web agency, then worked for a startup on some SaaS and then started working for household names in London. And here I am focussing on serverless stuff, building teams, helping orgs. Amazing to think how lucky I am really. But a lot of hard work and sacrifice too.
Phishing for you, for me it was binding Sub7 to innocent binaries, sending it to people on IRC and then opening their CD drive when they least expected it. Fun times.
Nice to see you went through the mIRC phase as well. I keep thinking I should write an article on the lost art of mIRC scripts... it was all about writing code and feeling cool about it.
Oh, yeah! I did the Sub7 thing too. And Back Orifice. Good times. I was the scriptyist little script kiddie ever. I largely had no idea what I was doing, but whatever it was, I wanted to do it.
I'm not self-taught (bachelors CS degree), but this is the first time I've seen somebody else mention this way of learning things. I basically do the same thing; skim lots of things and inefficiently modify code until I eventually get the whole picture. Do you feel like this keeps you from having deep knowledge about certain subjects? I always feel like I am _eventually_ pretty good at knowing how a project is supposed to function, but then I see people having deep random knowledge about compiler flags or frameworks or whatever and I go back to wondering if my knowledge-skimming keeps me from deeply understanding things.
> I see people having deep random knowledge about compiler flags or frameworks or whatever
Why learn flags when we always have `man` close by?
Do you know Tsoding? He's a live coder on YouTube that works like that. It's a bit maddening when he tries to look for some information and can't just stop and read instead of skimming and googling around, but on the other hand he's able to learn about a thing, and use a thing productively in minutes. That's our forte I guess.
It's proved useful a lot in my career, when you're not given much context and you're asked for an answer to a pressing problem: "No, I don't know Elastic Search. What do you mean it is on fire, and I have to fix it? Ugh, sure, give me a few."
Also ADHD and being self taught means I have my own, weird, probably not very efficient way of learning things that involves a lot of skimming metric tons of information. Ingesting new information is how I keep my brain stimulated. Honestly, I never understood why often learning is an effort separate from the act of using. Why people tend to go on a course, absorb information, then just later use it. They should be interwoven, learn by doing and do by learning.
Also my parents couldn't afford to send me to a real university (I wanted to go to MIT as a kid and I was in the middle of nowhere in Southern Europe), so there's that.