About: Human. Artist. Hacker. I care about free and open-source software(F/LOSS), cybersecurity, ethical design, privacy, and technology. I encourage people to become better humans through heavy metal.
When I joined, some 20+ years ago, it was all about fun, experimenting with technology, creating products on those new gadgets, and writing moving things over the internet .
Now, it's different. What drove you to [programming, web development, ...], and where do you think the fun is?
Is there anyone here who joined just for the money? I am curious :)
Coding is, at the end of the day, really fun.
It can be a complicated and stressful for both technical and people reasons that make it un-fun at times, but the raw craft is truly fun.
Ben, I agree - it's fun. I guess you started doing it because it is like that. Thanks for sharing. I am also trying to get some other reasons of why people do what they do apart from the fun, excitement and experimenting.
I've always been interested in technology and taking things apart to see if I could fix them or just to see how things work. I remember being a kid and the concept of just a TV was mind blowing to me how they could get videos into the box through a cable lol.
My family was very pore and we basically only saw computers in schools, until I got an old DOS IBM given to me by the school around the age of 7. When I was about 9 my mom got a Gateway with Windows 98 and she set a password. To her surprise she came into the room and I was playing on it and she couldn't figure out how I logged in. All I did was hit cancel at the login and it took me to the guest account but just because I tried something most others didn't she started calling people telling them about it. I didn't think it was a big deal but she did 😄
Anyway, early on in high school I went to one of my teachers houses to do a project and her son was there who just so happened to be a college professor in computer science and he was showing me a 3D model head he had created where you could type something and it would move and speak. I asked him to show me how to build something like that and he said I had to start small. He showed me how to make tables and images in HTML and that's all I needed.
I went home and started downloading websites from that old dial up and started tearing apart the code to see what would happen if I removed parts and taught myself HTML that way. As time went on I took Programming, A+, and Net+, then started learning things as I needed to on my own.
I joined Dev because the people around me in my day to day have no clue what I'm talking about when I'm excited about my projects or basically anything I talk about involving technology. It's not always fun to feel like the smartest person in the room. This place is full of helpful and extremely intelligent people and I'm happy to have possibly found a home here.
Whoa. What an inspiring story! I do like people showing other people how to start!
Ben, I agree - it's fun. I guess you started doing it because it is like that.
I started programming in my early teens out of curiosity. I loved playing games back then and I figured why not follow a simple tutorial video online to create a 2D game in Unity. The physics of the game didn't quite work 😅, but I created something and I felt really proud to show my friends. From then I was hooked. I then started to teach myself basic web development. Now, I work professionally and I write content for the BlueSockets blog on React.js/Next.js/Typescript