[renewiltord]

To be honest, I arrived at university fully capable of my first job out. I think most people do. The selection process has you write essays and do math and all that shit.

Work is hard, but like most things you learn best doing the thing. Not saying SICP was shit. Just that I could have done that in high school and accelerated my time to money (and through it, contentment).

Maybe I'll let my kids do something like that if they feel the mildest desire to.

[derwiki]

Kudos to you— having started coding QBasic in fifth grade, I definitely needed 3-4 years of undergrad to be ready for my first professional SWE job.

[renewiltord]

That's really funny. We first did Logo and then BASIC at that age (~10 years). Good times, eh? Back in the day? Everything was new and fresh.

[derwiki]

I was _thrilled_ that I could program with something already on my PC. This was before the internet, and I was under the impression a C compiler was several hundred dollars that we couldn’t afford. Eventually, I even wrote “production” QBasic: my boss at the ISP would manually move spam to a spam folder in Thunderbird, export it periodically and kick it over to tech support. We used to manually look at IPs and enter them into the Cisco blocklist, until I wrote a super janky QBasic script to extracts IPs.

Two years later, I learned about regular expressions.

[renewiltord]

Haha incredible. What a story. Love that you managed to use BASIC in production. What a tale.

We had to go to computer lab at school to use the computer. But then my parents spent a fortune on getting us one. Now that I think about it, it was like half a year's rent. Jesus Christ, what were they thinking?!

Mostly played games. But then got a Linux CD from a magazine when I was 13. Wiped the drive accidentally trying to partition it. Disaster. Path to writing code begun.