How did you learn how to program?

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When I was a kid in the fourth grade, I started taking home BASIC programming books from the school library to read. I would use them during recess to write little programs on the class’s Apple IIe. My mom noticed and got me a Radio Shack-brand programmable graphing calculator for Christmas or maybe it was my birthday. It had a stripped-down version of BASIC that let me do all kinds of things with it. It was my constant companion.

We had computer labs in schools in those days and that scratched the itch for awhile after I outgrew the calculator. We got a home computer at one point in the AOL days, and in high school after broadband and parts stores became common I finally built my own. I took a programming class in middle school but I didn’t find it very interesting, we used PASCAL.

I bought a huge, thick book on C++ that would have substituted as a blunt-force weapon when I was in high school. C++ didn’t take for me, I was, and still am, a dynamic language guy that gravitates towards the web rather than hardware or systems coding. I learned to make simple websites in school, but schools and the community college I picked did not really push me the way I would have needed to have a career in it. A big problem I had in retrospect was lack of real role models in the tech field.

It always seemed like some hobby thing to me, so I joined the military rather than stay in college. I had bigger dreams anyway. Once I was free of training and I was at my regular job, I bought a computer, it was no longer really economical to build them, and was a more of a power user than a programmer for several years.

I hated the military and managed to get out before my contract was up. I worked with my estranged father in the construction field for a few years as an electrical apprentice, switched to low voltage, then eventually got a job manning a small datacenter for a small Atlanta IT outsourcing shop. My sysadmin experience served me in good stead when I finally decided to make a go as a professional programmer.

After spending close to ten years in various other types of jobs, I took to the professional world like a duck to water. For me it was always about deciding I wanted to be a professional, that decision took some fifteen years to make after I first started coding. Sometimes I wish I’d have had access to all these awesome school programs that teach and glorify coding, other times I like that I grew up in a time where it was difficult to find time to program so I made the most of whatever I had.