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Thinking about the beginning of my programming life. Throwback style.
I remember my first encounter was with #qbasic. Year ~2002-2003. Not on a computer! But with pen and paper. My school didn't have computers. We would wrote it and submit to "human compiler"
A thread
I remember my first encounter was with #qbasic. Year ~2002-2003. Not on a computer! But with pen and paper. My school didn't have computers. We would wrote it and submit to "human compiler"
A thread
In that period I got my first PC. And somehow get in possession of an html file that had piece of javascript in it. Calculating nr of seconds from your birthday and refreshing it in your browser.
Oh boi, I've been "hacking" that file over and over. Offline of course.
Oh boi, I've been "hacking" that file over and over. Offline of course.
No Internet at the time. And by hacking, I mean learning what works and what not.
In high school we had programming in each of 4 years. Same lessons, different languages. IIRC QBASIC, C, C++, Fortran (?!)
Easy grades for me because I just need to adapt to the new syntax. We didn't actually learn new concepts. Mostly solving some algebra tasks
Easy grades for me because I just need to adapt to the new syntax. We didn't actually learn new concepts. Mostly solving some algebra tasks
I was always learning things additionally. Once I learned how to play music notes with qbasic, transformed some folk music and sent it to some of my classmates to execute it and impress others.
What they didn't know is which melody it was and that you can't turn it off
What they didn't know is which melody it was and that you can't turn it off
In college I've heard there's this company in my town which is doing Java so I've started to learn it. Oh boi, I didn't have a clue what it looks like in real life. All of those * patterns we draw with system out println. God knows how I got the job.
To this day I believe my will to learn new things and consistency got me onboard. It wasn't the Java knowledge, for sure!
I studied for Sun Certified Java Professional, and passed the exam. I've been actually learning Java from it. All the tiny gotchas that Java is hiding. I was a walking Java compiler in that period. The exam looks like "here's the code, what's the output"
This was around when Oracle got Java from Sun, so it was Oracle Certified Professional Java Programmer. I liked the SCJP abbreviation better.
All of this seems so far and so near. And it changed my life, for sure. Made some things possible. I remember having that certificate framed on the wall of my flat I bought on a loan.
For someone it was funny to put it on the wall, but for me it was a thing that give me the opportunity to have that loan, totally standalone.
And I'm always saying, for this job you don't need an expensive tools and machines. Your knowledge is your toolbox. And it can give you so much opportunities. I remember being sent to a big conference in Belgium, and that happened when I was pretty junior dev. Amazing feeling.
So, always learn, always read, always improve. You never know where you can end up.
This thread went into another direction. Wanted to have some overview of the beginnings, but it ended up like this. I felt like sharing it. However, thanks for reading. What's your story?
