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Growing up, what my late father probably wanted most from me is for me to find a project of my own. When I was in high school, he once threatened me with "get a
by celrod 5y ago
Growing up, what my late father probably wanted most from me is for me to find a project of my own. When I was in high school, he once threatened me with "get a life, or I will get you one".
Engines, and especially motorcycles, were always a passion of his. He grew up on a farm, and "was rebuilding tractor engines when the other kids were learning to ride bicycles."
He still holds a few land speed records he set with motorcycles he designed and built.
But I had no real hobbies or passions of my own, other than playing card games.
It wasn't until my twenties, after I already graduated college with degrees I wasn't interested in and my dad's health failed, that I first tried programming. A decade earlier, my dad was attending the local Linux meetings when away from his machine shop.
Programming, and especially performance optimization/loop vectorization are now my passion and consume most of my free time (https://github.com/JuliaSIMD/LoopVectorization.jl https://github.com/JuliaSIMD/LoopVectorization.jl).
Hearing all the stories about people starting and getting hooked when they were 11 makes me feel like I lost a dozen years of my life. I had every opportunity, but just didn't take them. If I had children, I would worry for them.
- the_only_law 5y agoI got my start around 11 but kinda squandered it. Spent most of my time reading about random obscure languages/technologies/frameworks I wouldn’t understand until years later (though it’s great because I can hold a conversation on a topic for a little bit while being completely incompetent) and swearing I was going to make games until I realized I couldn’t do asset design worth shit. To this day I don’t think I’ve ever made (graphical) game. I was around 14 when I first heard about Haskell, I didn’t know anything about it, functional programming, type theory, lambda calculus or anything related. I just knew it was a programming language. Nowadays I see people around that age programming relatively fluently with it. All the actual programming I ever did as a kid was make terrible websites, console apps that did nothing useful in particular and a few desktop app shells that did the same. I was probably around 17 before I did anything “serious” and even at that point it wasn’t great. Now I’m not very old, so I’m not sure if it was simply the environment I was in, but I didn’t know that many other people that were into programming when I was a teenager, even with the internet and all I was normally the youngest guy in every chat/forum/site/group I was on. Nowadays though, I know several teenagers that could code circles around me.
- schrijver 5y agoYou left out… whether you had fun? Because it sounds like you feel your teenage hobby should have been a productive and focused use of your time leading to some kind of useful product. Which seems like a pretty high bar to set, and, like, besides the point?
- saalweachter 5y ago> Hearing all the stories about people starting and getting hooked when they were 11 makes me feel like I lost a dozen years of my life. To be totally honest, most of us who start programming when we are <some small age> don't really get that large of a head start. I'd probably count all of my programming experience from ages 10-20 before I switched from math to CS as "no more valuable than 1-2 years of dedicated undergraduate experience". The biggest value of early programming experience is learning if you enjoy it well enough to not hate a career at it.
- Tarsul 5y agoYou'd worry like your dad, and in the end your kid would still find its way like you did :) Also, there's no use in regrets. Only lessons learned.