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Jeremy Falcon wrote: I did it for the nookie.
So you can take that cookie
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Ain't no rest for the wicked.
Jeremy Falcon
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When I was about 10, my Dad was at the Consumer Electronics Show when it was in Chicago, IL. He saw and purchased a Timex Sinclair XZ80 there for $100. 1K RAM with the optional 4K RAM module! Saved programs on a tape recorder and cassette tapes. Display was an old B&W TV. Programming lang was BASIC.
My Dad was a sheet metal worker who learned sheet metal skills while in the Navy. Also did HVAC and roofing. He was always the one who stressed education, especially learning how to learn things on your own. My Dad wasn't particularly tech-savvy like people are now. His own era's tech (TV, radio, stereos, plastics, etc.) always interested him. But he saw the future in computers and bought one when he had the chance so the whole family could learn. But that last part didn't happen. I was the only one in the family to gravitate to it. He worked with it a little and found it interesting. It came pretty easy to me. I was the one who could do 8-12 hrs/day learning and working with it.
I wound up learning to program BASIC by reading and typing in programs all the time, mostly games, from programming books and computer magazines, studying a BASIC language reference guide and how the computer actually did things internally. He was the one who put it in my mind that computers are the future and I would be able to make a good, life-long living if you understand them and how to program them. To me it was fun and challenging. I knew what I was going to do with my life since I was 10.
Dad passed away when I was 14, the summer between 8th grade and freshman year in HS. At the time we started programming classes in junior year of HS, I already had been programming for about 6 years on my own. One class was programming on an IBM System/360. Another was my first experience with an IBM PC, programming in (wait for it...) BASIC. And that was my first introduction to a company called Microsoft. Used their BASIC interpreter. Unfortunately, my Dad passed away about the time he and I started learning about the stock market, before anything there made sense to me. So I didn't know that I could buy stock in Microsoft as a company. I never put 2 and 2 together on that one around the time they went public. Had my Dad been around for about another year, I think things would have turned out a LOT differently for us in the financial arena.
I outgrew the TS ZX80 and moved on to a Radio Shack Color Computer (CoCo). Always hated that abbreviation. 16K RAM. Still saving programs on a tape recorder and cassette tapes. But it was good and you could do a good deal on it in addition to playing games. Display was on a COLOR TV. Whoo-HOO! Then I got a 5.25" floppy disk drive, a dot matrix printer, a word processing program, and a modem. In HS, I did my first pro-level work at 17 for our band program: a program to manage data about our band program's sheet music library. Yes, band geek here.
I went through high school and half of college with that same setup. With a word processing program for my Color Computer, I was able to do all my term papers, assignments, etc. Modem allowed me to remotely connect to systems at college for my programming class work.
Then in my first year of college, I got my first experience with the C language and a Digital Equipment Corp VAX machine.
I also started working for Radio Shack in the evenings after school. It was a good college job. Above all they taught you how to sell. I still use those skills today. Worked there for 3.5 years. One of the sales contests I won was a 50% discount on anything in the store up to a certain dollar amount. So I bought my first PC-clone: a Tandy 1000 TL, 286 machine. Continued learning, using, and programming on that to finish up my undergrad college days. Then I was recruited by Andersen Consulting (Accenture today) for my first permanent corporate position.
That's how I started in programming/development. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! 
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I was an electronics kid. I could solder and knew my components from making fuzz boxes and stuff for my guitar. This got me in the door in the 80s in So. Cal where Reagan was king and electronics was on fire.
Eventually I found myself as a test tech in a the DEC VAR market where there were people I got to know who wrote c for terminal programs and assembly for bit slice boards we sold. I got pretty close to cc vi and the wide pipelined AM2901 listings working in engineering.
I managed to get my paws on an LSI-11/23 (PDP 11/23 clone) for home with a 30mb hd and cc and vi and the K&R book when I was about 23.
When the PC Clones from Taiwan started showing up in cubicles we all had to have one. And of course a c compiler was in order for me as I knew some z80 assy and some i8031 too and c was a hit with me. I forget what compiler that was but I got Borland C++ shortly after that from EggHead.
It was all about surfin BBS systems in that day also.
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I had a passion for electronics, but it was expensive in 1973 when I was in 6th grade. A 7476 flip flop cost $4 at Radio Shack, and that was 1973 money that a 6th grader didn't have.
So I walked up to the third floor of the school that I was at, walked into the computer room, read the instructions on how to start a terminal session on a teletype machine (with a punch tape!).
Instructions said "Press CTRL+C" to start.
I did.
The computer promptly crashed. Turned out that the PDP-11's mag tape drive shared the CPU board's power supply, and if it drew too much current, the CPU board died. I was hooked but I made a quick dash for the exit thinking I'd really broken something and didn't venture back into the "computer room" until 7th grade.
In 7th grade I struggled to understand how the computer new that if I said:
10 let a = 5
15 let b = 10
20 print a + b
that it "knew" that a was 5. I needed to understand how computer memory worked. One day, I just "got it."
By 8th grade I was teaching BASIC to the seniors in the high school. The rest is history.
Marc
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I just started hanging out with the wrong crowd.
Peter Wasser
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
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In 1969, my high school started a computer programming pilot program using an IBM System/360[^], which I enrolled in. All of our programs were in Fortran IV, punched on 80 column punch cards. My first program computed the sum of the first 10 integers, and worked correctly the first time (the classic "Hello World" had not yet been invented). The computer had a quite respectable 2 Megabytes of memory. I was amazed at the things I could do with this newfangled device, and was smitten.
Nowadays, there is more programming power in an Apple watch.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that...
- Harvey
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It all started for me when I was given a Commodore 64 by my parents, we had Atari2600 games console before this, and obviously this was the next step. It wasn't ApplevsGoogle back then, it was Commodore vs Spectrum.
Did the usual copying long programs out of magazines, just to get a ?Syntax Error. After the C64, I moved onto the Amiga500. But it wasn't until I left school and joined BP on their apprenticeship scheme for Offshore Oil&Gas, we started to get taught simple programming as part of the course, I remember we used a BBC Micro for this. After doing the basic into to the syntax, keywords, program flow/logic etc. one of the exercises that still sticks in my mind was to write a program in as few lines/characters as possible that wrote out to screen the all verses of "10 green bottles".
A couple years laters on the apprenticeship, we were into microprocessor programming, and still remember punching strings of hex codes into so CPU evaluation board.
I went offshore in 1992 as an instrument tech, and that's where the interest really picked up (The instrument department had 386 laptop that was the envy of everyone onboard) as we had to do the programming on the plant controllers, plc's etc. However, on nightshift, it was pretty quiet, so I started to teach myself Visual Basic (VB3) and then progressed through the versions, into .Net and then made the switch to C# as my language of choice in probably around 2011.
If was not long after going offshore that I purchased my first PC at home. Took a loan out from the bank for it, it was a Escom 486 DX2 66. I remember having to justify to the bank why I wanted it!
From that point, there was no going back really.
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It was that kid down the road, Charles who got me started. Him and his bloody girlfriend Ada!
veni bibi saltavi
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Nagy Vilmos wrote: his bloody girlfriend Ada!
Wasn't she in Deep Throat? Or rather wasn't everyone else in it? 
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I was 6 or 8, I can't remember and my parents took me to a trade fair where it was a booth with some super old computers (new at that time) they had installed a sum and rest simple program I played with a little.
That was my first contact, I loved it and started going to academies to learn MSDOS, GWBASIC, DBASE III and IV, LOTUS 123 and C.
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I loved to play using computer and then started to know about google and chat things. I also want to know what they actually do with computer and slowly learned flash then got interested in web designing.
Slowly came across the technology and finally changed as full stack developer.
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Insanity runs in the family!
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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Mostly at school.
Had a great teacher, and that fitted my introverted self.
I'd rather be phishing!
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The best Christmas gift I ever got was a TI/994a back in '83. Not only was it good for games, but best of all I could write programs that solved problems, like math or geometry homework. I could even use the cassette drive to save, then reload my programs!..until the interface gave out! I didn't really deal with computers again until I started college a few years later, becoming a CS major and learned the basics of c, pascal, and fortran, before finding a part-time job that became full-time, and kept me out of the lab....I wound up quitting school and became a press operator for most of the next 10 years.
When I decided that I was ready to go back and finish school in '98, the programming world was in a much different place than I had left it...you didn't just type in programs into a terminal in the lab and pray that they compiled, then print out your code and results on greenbar paper.  Finally, I could do my 'lab' work at home, at any hour of the day!
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I was working as chemist at time, and we got an Inductively Coupled Argon Plasma Spectrophotometer that used a PDP-11 for massaging the detector signals. I thought it would be nice if we could get elemental composition percentages during the analysis. So I learned PDP-11 assembly and wrote a statistics program. Then I wrote some programs to work with gas spectro results when the ICAP was not being used. Things kinda got out of hand after that, and I wound up owning a computer store (anybody remember KayPro?) and doing custom programming for the oil driling industry in Alaska.
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For me it was a bit of accident / luck. When I was younger I wanted to join the Army as a mechanic. But then I lost the hearing in my left ear and that was the end of that.
So while my dad was still in hte army and working in Germany I joined the Youth Training Scheme and started to work for the Small System Group for the army.
My first introduction to programming was a system for SSAFA, a housing system. When I returned to the UK I started Uni and got my first job real IT job after that.
Every day, thousands of innocent plants are killed by vegetarians.
Help end the violence EAT BACON
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My father worked in a hospital in the communist Hungary...One way to get equipment from the west was via sealed containers of electronics...Some of the electronics were not used after examination (didn't fit?) and the employees could buy if relatively cheap...So I got a C64...And the rest, they say, is history...
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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School, mid 1970s. A couple of maths teachers (Rick Dunsby & Brian Thomas) ran a computing "club". We started with, IIRC, Casio FX-201P programmable calculators and then they got hold of one of these.....
MONROBOT-XI[^]
Picture[^]
Ours had only the one TTY and (paper) tape reader/punch.
Integer arithmetic only, no divide or multiplication operators, hand assembly of mnemonics to op codes and no editing of entered code. Make a balls-up part way through typing a routine in and you had to re-enter it all from scratch. Mind you it was only marginally slower to boot (10 or 15 minutes) than a Windoze PC and most of that time was waiting for the drum to get up to speed.
Unfortunately Mr. Dunsby then went on to build a micro based on the 6800 which ran (a) Kansas City Basic and it was all downhill from there. 
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In 1974, my father gave an evening course in FORTRAN for high-school students at the local University. Note that this was still the age of punched cards and batch processing. He took me along a few evenings, and I wrote my first program. It set a precedent by having a bug in it. 
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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Took a Fortran class in high school, joined the Air Force where they taught me COBOL and let me get a Computer and Information Science degree, and the rest is history.
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Nah...it's just you live in the past!
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I find myself doing things I would never do in C# code. The two most common things are:
1) copy and paste code from one HTML page to another
Why? Because making something reusable requires:
a. create a separate js file
b. put the functions in there
c. add a <script> line to suck it in
d. remember that I have these common functions in this other file when writing other pages
OK, I suppose that's sort of the same steps in a real programming language, it just seems harder when working on a website.
2) everything tends to be inline code.
I like to practice writing human readable and short methods when I code in C#. Conversely, when I code in Javascript, I'll do something like this (a somewhat trivial example, granted, but it makes the point):
$('#spinny').jqxLoader('open');
This is completely non-reusable and un-maintainable. Imagine hundreds of pages that all have spinny's for when the page does some sort of AJAX callback, and maybe you want to change something about the spinny behavior.
So this:
function showSpinny() {
$('#spinny').jqxLoader('open');
}
while seemingly stupid, becomes a re-usable and maintainable piece of code.
I wonder what it is about Javascript that promotes these (I only cite two examples) practices? Is it just me? I don't think so, I see other developers writing the same cruft. Albeit, they're also Python developers, and I see the same cruft in their Python code.
Marc
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