Software development? Shortly after getting a job as a developer! I kind of always knew I could probably program, but had resisted software development and di

Software development? Shortly after getting a job as a developer! I kind of always knew I could probably program, but had resisted software development and didn't really "get" computer science or development. I resisted going into software development for a very long time. Post uni I got a job as a (very underpaid) "data analyst" at a consultancy firm. While doing that job I despaired at the state of tools and while there was a separate "development team" that got to play with C# and develop the "New project" that was going to replace all the cobbled together analyst tools, we analysts had to make do with the Access VBA solution (that itself was a migration of an earlier cobbled-together excel solution). I learned to develop by playing around with that solution, fixing bugs and improving speed. My best speed-up was just by having the data copied locally; when I arrived everyone ran the access file from the network share. All the data processing was round-tripping every call it made via the network. Processing went from an over-night job to being run in minutes. One of the advantages of having the developer team tied up in the (forever delayed) "new solution" was that the analysts were left to themselves to mess about with their own tools in peace. I drifted away from that job and when I was ready to work again I just decided could probably do software development after all and so got a job doing VB6 development. I fluffed the interview, forgetting the syntax for a simple loop in VB6 but I got the job anyway. Perhaps because there weren't many people wanting to do VB6 in 2012! In that job I mostly just learned on the job. It helped to have great colleagues from whom I could learn how to approach things and learned the ins and outs of development and how it differed from programming. Computer science? My interest in computer science came much later, mostly thanks to TIS100 as well as Petzold's CODE. Those really helped me understand some of the computer science behind the programming. That said, I'm still not that sure of my compsci skills, I tried to watch a Data Structures course someone posted here recently and it took me straight back to uni maths where watching it I had a feeling of, "This all seems true and I get that it's true but I don't understand". Like, it's great being able to prove all sorts of things about the nature of those data structures but the actual computer science stuff seems so disconnected to the real world. You can halfway through the lecture and realise that while all the structures have those nice provable properties, actual implementation is left to the reader, or worse, an "open problem".