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Ask HN: What moment led to you becoming a coder?
Since many of us will be sitting in our old rooms again, coding away on some Christmas project or another (and I hope this remains respectful to those who aren't at home, or can't be at the moment), I wanted to know what led you to become a coder in the first place? For me, it was Winter Challenge (1991), where, as an overly confident 14-year old, I tried to manipulate my high-scores by changing the EXE (or COM?) file. I broke it, of course. And with no backup disk, I set out to just make another Winter Challenge in Q-Basic. Which, obviously, failed even more so. But many PRINTs and GOTOs later, I had found a hobby that has given back so much over the years. I was curious to hear your stories.
- tomcam 6y ago1984. I asked my friend how you programmed a game. “In assembly language,” he announced snidely, knowing I wasn’t technical at all. Literally three years later I wrote my own compiler in C with a giant, rich runtime library including a TUI all in x86. Made a living at it. A few years after that I was on the Visual Basic team. My friend never actually learned ASM. Nor was he ever good enough to get a job as a programmer.
- mittermayr 6y agoLet me just say thanks for your work on VB. It changed everything for me. I pirated it (I didn’t even know of any place that sold it) from a guy spanned over however many disks it took, and I ran with it. Once I’d realised it was made by Microsoft, I made a note in my career journal at school that I want to work there one day. It took me a good decade, but I eventually got that job in Redmond. Must have been an interesting time in Seattle back then.
- tomcam 6y agoWorking in the VB team was by far the greatest professional experience of my life. The people were lovely and brilliant to a person. Nothing like going to lunch with Tim Patersen or Anders Hejlsberg or Eric Lippert and asking about technical stuff I’d wondered about for a decade. Congratulations on making it there yourself! What groups did you work in?
- mittermayr 6y agoOffice, a little bit of Lync, video conferencing research, and then competitive intelligence stuff. It did feel like the interesting times had long passed when I arrived (just when Bill Gates left), and often thought about what it must have been like.
- ojnabieoot 6y agoI really didn’t want to be - I went to grad school for math, and generally disliked the programming I was familiar with (basic C, intermediate Scheme, and a lot of MATLAB). I had written some small games in C and TI-BASIC in middle school, and enjoyed writing algorithms in Scheme, but otherwise found programming tedious and frustrating. I never did it for fun. And as a practical matter I was too ivory-tower to get even a MATLAB job (no Simulink / etc). So although I could program I never considered myself a “coder.” Fast forward to an analyst gig at a startup that didn’t work out due to an unscrupulous CEO: I ended up homeless and took an entry level C# job. So “economic desperation in 2016” was, unfortunately, the moment. But it turns out programming in C# is a lot less frustrating than MATLAB! There was a whole world in “practical” computer science that I was completely unaware of. Later I discovered dependent types and theorem provers, which I suppose means I’ve come full circle. In 2021 I am taking time off to work on a serious Idris project :)
- tiernano 6y agoFor me, it was the commodore 64... waiting for games to load off tape took too long, so I ended up picking up the C64 Basic manual and read though it. It had a load of code samples, so after the game loaded and after i got board, i ended up writing and playing with the code samples. few years later, i got a "proper" PC, got a copy of Borland Delphi on the front of a magazine, and started developing Windows apps there. Then on to C++, VB, VB.NET and now C#... so... waiting times got me into it!
- mittermayr 6y agoTo this day I miss the simplicity of a Delphi exe that just worked everywhere.