| I (American male, age 32) initially got into programming because my dad said I should try it. We had a Compaq Windows 97 machine I loved to tinker with--rural hometown, not much to do. He brought the QBasic editor home on a floppy disk and a print out of a tutorial online. First thing I did was try to PRINT Hello, world, but when I didn’t understand how to run a program, I thought maybe I literally needed to press print on the printer. It didn’t work. Later I used that bit of BASIC to program my TI-86 calculator from reading its manual to "show my work" in math class because my math dyslexia led to a lot of partial credit because of how often I mixed up numbers while writing them down from my head. Teachers didn’t mind since it took a lot of understanding to write the programs from scratch. Later I went to college as an art major. I took quite a few digital classes, and I usually had the most interesting Flash projects because I was the only one that vaguely understood how and what coding ActionScript could do. I decided to minor in computer science in my 2nd or 3rd year as a fallback in case "art" didn’t pan out. I got a website-building paid internship through the university my senior year. After school I took a short contract to build a few-page website for an acquaintance in my college town. I did everything from setting up the GNU/Linux VPS, overkill CodeIgnitor PHP framework, front-end for IE7, design, and even shooting photography. When I looked for a real job after that, I didn’t have any luck in design but landed a Python position at a big company many miles away in which I was vastly underqualified for (didn’t know the languages, source control, how to do "meetings" and Agile). I (rightfully) didn’t last long, but I did learn a lot about how "professional" software should be built. I took some time off (but also couldn’t land a new gig with my experience), moved back in with my folks, and decided to teach myself more thoroughly how to build websites. I landed another gig at ad agency and it gave me a lot of attempts to build basic landing page-type sites and practice other skills in a lower-risk environment. I mostly avoided JavaScript though because I didn’t understand it and when I did I used purely procedural code. When I finally did decide to learn JS and design patterns, functional programming was starting to get the indie, "cool" vibes (2015)--and unlike my earlier failed attempts to teach myself object-oriented programming, FP kinda "stuck". My bullheadedness let me go chase that paradigm specifically which led me to now doing purely-functional front-end applications despite the lower amount of available jobs. I’m pretty far from the design, and my art skills are severely rusty, but I’m generally happy making the switch as remote work is plentiful and normalized in the field, and now I get to travel the world (pre-COVID) while I build things and having never-ending puzzles to solve. |