4 ms·

I "caught the bug" when I was 14 and messing around with mirc scripting with some IRC buddies. I scripted a bunch of stuff for controlling mp3's, and a few soc

I "caught the bug" when I was 14 and messing around with mirc scripting with some IRC buddies. I scripted a bunch of stuff for controlling mp3's, and a few socket bots to protect from channel takeovers. Then I wanted a mp3 player more like itunes is today, and so I set about making one in VB. From there I progressed to games, in VB and Java, such as space invaders etc, dabbled a bit with 3d programming. Moved to the web, HTML, JS, followed by PHP, then some JSP/Servlets and ASP through a work requirement, learned SQL Server and databases in general from a MCDBA who was also a MCT. Messed with C and linux, borrowed some books from the library and read every page, lost my way a bit and learned about creating exploits. Then got back on track, some c++, some ASP.NET/C#. And the list goes on. My language and framework of choice is now Ruby on Rails.

Tichy 18y ago
And what is the reason you did not want to study? Just trying to understand... Obviously, it is a money issue (earning 3 years vs paying 3 years). But if you enjoy the stuff, wouldn't it be natural to study it? For example, personally I am bored by now by web programming, and university really wasn't so much about practical programming. I liked the theory, complexity of algorithms and so on. in your self-taught curriculum, did you ever come across those kinds of things? Do you/did you care? If you are truly interested in that stuff, but don't want to spend the money, why not do it in a remote learning course or something? I mean, you want to learn the stuff anyway, why not get credit for it? Obviously it is better to create a new distributed hashing algorithm by creating something like bittorrent, rather than doing theoretical work about it at university. But university is not so bad, and some results from academia do spill over into the real world. Just today a friend told me about a program he got to analyze that did user authentication on the client. It is amazing to me that people can be able to program such Java clients, yet be unable to understand the security issue. They can program, yet they can not program. Maybe it is because it is so easy to learn programming, and bad code actually runs, too, that employers like to see some additional verification like a CS degree (and of course the CS degree is not guarantee stuff like that won't happen).
- matthewking 18y ago
  Freedom to do what I want to do I guess. In the UK there's a 5 year gap between finishing secondary school, and finishing university (2 years of college in between). During that 5 years, I've lived in 3 completely different locations within England, and lived in another country for a few years too. I've worked for big companies, small companies, startup companies and now myself. It was a personal decision, that I took, and I don't regret it one bit. I'm not even in the market to get a job, I just had an old annoyance come back when I noticed a few startups requiring degree's for their jobs on here, I thought startups would be different to the usual useless HR departments in that they should be able to tell good developers to bad, without filtering on whether they have a degree or not..

Tichy 18y ago

And what is the reason you did not want to study? Just trying to understand... Obviously, it is a money issue (earning 3 years vs paying 3 years). But if you enjoy the stuff, wouldn't it be natural to study it? For example, personally I am bored by now by web programming, and university really wasn't so much about practical programming. I liked the theory, complexity of algorithms and so on. in your self-taught curriculum, did you ever come across those kinds of things? Do you/did you care? If you are truly interested in that stuff, but don't want to spend the money, why not do it in a remote learning course or something? I mean, you want to learn the stuff anyway, why not get credit for it? Obviously it is better to create a new distributed hashing algorithm by creating something like bittorrent, rather than doing theoretical work about it at university. But university is not so bad, and some results from academia do spill over into the real world. Just today a friend told me about a program he got to analyze that did user authentication on the client. It is amazing to me that people can be able to program such Java clients, yet be unable to understand the security issue. They can program, yet they can not program. Maybe it is because it is so easy to learn programming, and bad code actually runs, too, that employers like to see some additional verification like a CS degree (and of course the CS degree is not guarantee stuff like that won't happen).

matthewking 18y ago
Freedom to do what I want to do I guess. In the UK there's a 5 year gap between finishing secondary school, and finishing university (2 years of college in between). During that 5 years, I've lived in 3 completely different locations within England, and lived in another country for a few years too. I've worked for big companies, small companies, startup companies and now myself. It was a personal decision, that I took, and I don't regret it one bit. I'm not even in the market to get a job, I just had an old annoyance come back when I noticed a few startups requiring degree's for their jobs on here, I thought startups would be different to the usual useless HR departments in that they should be able to tell good developers to bad, without filtering on whether they have a degree or not..