I’m always interested in hearing other’s stories and what they’re working on. Anyone care to share?
Both, though since going pro, I have less time for hobby coding. Or rather I should say, my eyes and brain can only take so much.
I’ve been a hobbyist script guy for a long time, and had no aspirations to start a career as a SWE. The opportunity just fell into my lap, when I joined a startup in an entry level support position, and wrote some tools to make my workflows easier. A director took notice, and got me a position on a new engineering team. The rest is history. Turns out I really like doing it professionally, as well.
I’m a BE engineer, working mostly in Python. Telecommunications stuff, can’t really say more.
Pro and hobbyist. I started by learning Basic back in the late 1970’s. Got a EE with strong emphasis on Analog and DSP. Did analog for test and measurement systems but had to add microprocessors (and EPROMs and RAM) to build the systems that control the analog. For embedded I learned C. For PCs I did Basic, Forth (ugh), Turbo Pascal, Delphi, then C#. I’m heavy into unit testing. I did web development as well, back in 1997 to maybe 2010. Perl, PHP, MySQL, Linux, then Drupal. A lifetime ago.
I can’t tell what I’m working on now (professionally) but hobby-wise I do a lot of arduino stuff and some of it has been a blast. I did an automatic dog food dispenser a few years back that was an amazing tour of engineering your way out of failure. The look on my dogs face when the MK1 version sent a fire-hose stream of dog food across the room was awesome.Started as a hobbyist; took it up professionally, but never stopped hobbying. It was the BASIC listings for simple games in 3-2-1 Contact magazine that hooked me; books, family, and later the Internet helped me learn more and grow, and eventually I got a scholarship to go to college for computer engineering.
Currently between personal projects while I write platform code for autonomous vehicles. I do some personal web stuff and embedded IoT for smart home bits & bobs.
I clearly lost a bet about 10 years ago that we’d have autonomous cars everywhere by now.
As an insider of DevOps. It’s not really that magical for most firms or that new it’s mostly marketing fluff made to sell more capable admins.
What’s your cynical take on autonomous vehicles?
It’s a really really hard problem and while lots of really really smart people are trying really really hard to make them happen, it’s still going to take a really really long time and people are going to be really really resistant to the idea while Tesla keeps making the technology look really really bad, which is already starting to result in the government get really really suspicious and pass some really really stupid laws that will really really hurt progress.
Even once we’ve got real robot cars on the road, it’s going to be a niche novel technology for a good while since people are too stupid to realize that we’re far worse drivers. There may be an iPhone moment by some current or new player in the field, making the service sexy and attractive and even fashionable islf not merely desirable; the current prevalence of services like Uber will help with this cultural shift, but it’s way too early to tell exactly what this will look like.
Autonomous vehicles in some shape or form are an inevitability, but it might just end up boring, hamstrung, or relegated to basic operations like forklifts or shuttles.
I’m old (a few years shy of 50), and a second generation professional programmer. E.g.: when I was in kindergarten, my father’s main job was maintaining the COBOL compiler on a particular series of Sperry-Univac mainframes. I grew up in a house where the scratch paper for grocery lists was punchcards because my dad brought home reams of unused ones when they were being thrown out in the early 80s. (Fun fact: with a sharp pencil, it’s totally possible to fit a full D&D character sheet on the back of an unused punchcard)
So for “how did I get started”, I was born into it; I was of the age when you’d get magazines in the mail with code to type in (later, the magazines came with audio cassettes with programs on them). So BASIC initially, then in high school my dad got us a copy of Turbo Pascal and set me loose on that. (Plus tiny TSRs in x86 assembly)
I had a few mid- and upper-level programming classes in undergrad., but was a pure math major, not CS. (so didn’t get any CS theory classes, though I did have a job working for campus networking people) After grad school, I got a job writing code in java and perl for a company you’ve never heard of unless you were in a particular corner of the finance world in the late 90s/early 2000s. I’m now on my third or fourth employer, depending on whether you count a buyout that kept the team intact but moved offices as a change in employer.
My day-to-day coding these days is primarily in python and C++, but in the past six months it’s also included work haskell and go, not to mention sh scripts and the weird groovy dialect used in Jenkins.
Oddly enough, my hobbyist stuff these days has all been HTML+javascript because it just makes simple GUI demos so easy. It’s kind of wild coming from the mid-90s when I was heavily involved in early web stuff at my undergrad school to this new world where javascript mostly works and is a basically sensible language. Recent-ish projects have included a solver for the NYTimes “digits” game, a Mandlebrot set viewer and the “come back for more meeting” timer at breakmessage.com.
I started off in 2005 on Neopets. There was a feature that let you create your own custom pages for anything which I thought was the coolest thing at the time. I had to learn HTML and CSS to get started.
Turns out that was way cooler than Neopets. Don’t get me wrong, Neopets is awesome, but I absolutely fell in love with building with code back then. Fast-forward to now, I’m a senior dev at a VC studio helping various startups get off the ground.
I’m a fan of learning and building, so it’s kept me in this career ever since. It’s been fun seeing the times change with all sorts of tech. Am a giant fan of FOSS and love contributing where I can.
I posted my full story elsewhere, but my origin as a coder also starts with a game before I realized that coding was more interesting. In my case it was C&C: Red Alert, which was the first video game I got for Christmas.
I did the neopets thing too! I remember having to ask the local library to acquire books that taught HTML and CSS so I could learn it!
Sometimes I think about my Neopets being starved. A few years back I took the time to recover my ancient email and my Neopet account. After a few hours of labor I finally go to log in and I’m banned!
I’m a professional C++ developer. I started with a Visual Basic intro to programming class my freshman year of high school, took a few more of those, then went to college for computer engineering.
Now I work on embedded boiler controls.
I’m a professional developer but I started out as a hobbyist. I fell in love with programming after seeing all the neat things you could do with jailbroken iPhone back in the day, and while I don’t dabble in that area, I love having the ability to customize or alter something to suit my needs.
My current work is pretty boring and repetitive, so I’ve found some energy to write a workout routine newsletter, like their weren’t already enough workout apps haha. I also started a terminal SQL application that could be used for querying files. (insert into orangefiles.csv select Path, Name, FileSize from [./…/dir] where Name like ‘%orange%’) But I gave up on that because it was way over my head. Might pick it up again a few years in the future, it would be pretty useful.
Found out I’m really fucking good with Databases and SQL after failing my coding courses when I wanted to be a programmer. 15 years later I’m still going strong with a good career with Databases.
I’d love to be able to make my own API for a personal project and design a front-end for it but no matter how hard I try I can’t get my head around the software dev side of things
Hobbyist, professional, hobbyist.
Started with the VIC-20 shortly after the birth of my son. Ended up teaching a few community association recreational classes, which led to teaching introductory programming (among other things) at a private tech school.
That, in turn led to a few requests for small custom programs, software modifications, etc, and eventually my own freelance programming business doing everything from shop floor work order management to Palm Pilot integrations with, yes, mainframe systems.
When that business failed, I went to work full-time for my only remaining client. When that business was sold, the new owners made it clear that I was dead weight, so I left the field entirely and we moved to our cabin at the lake. (That was also the beginning of 10 years with no internet or cell service at home. Now we have Starlink.)
A decade later, I’m about to retire completely and I’m slowly getting back into it as a hobby.
I’ve always been a bit of a language junkie, but my current focus is on go, mostly because I’d like to better understand what’s going on under the hood in my current favourite language, Charm, which is written in go.
In retirement, assuming I can pull myself away from my shop and my fishing rod, I hope to build an as yet undetermined bit of software that others find useful or contribute to a project.
I’m a ways away from retirement, but i also have a dream of working on open-source and product that others can use. :)
Current title is “data architect”, but titles are meaningless. I sorta do whatever needs doing. Usually that means working with large databases and fixing performance issues. Right now I’m mostly focused on a distributed postgres database cluster using Citus (~5TB of data). Working with the data is fun, dealing with so many ingestion pipelines is annoying though.
Got my start in Jr High doing a bunch of web dev. Took a class called “computer math” in high school which was really just C and C++ programming (little bit of java). Did a comp sci degree in college. Pretty standard route I guess. Early in my career I discovered that I understand data better than most people for some reason (yay autism I guess). So I get focused on database problems and teaching people how to make data models that are usable and query-able and index-able.
What do you call someone who doesn’t call themselves a programmer in any capacity but has enough programming skills to make things work when he needs things working for non-programming-focused things like automation for material science experiments?
I am that.
Started out apprenticing as a Sysadmin, have been doing that until I got into DevOps. Always had an interest in programming as I was always limited in what I could do by what people had already created.
I’ve used Python, JavaScript, Golang, and now Rust over the course of my career.
Currently learning wasm and how Rust’s borrow checker and generics get along.
I learned my first language around 10-11, which was Lua (or at least Roblox’s flavor of it), because I stumbled into a “script builder” server one day that intrigued me.
People would post really long, confusing chat messages (which I would later learn were Lua scripts), then something would pop into the world in game, on their character, etc.
Turns out, the “script builder” server was running the chat as a constant compiler, executing chat messages against the server, then populating the game with the results. That left little old me in awe, and the people on there were super friendly and helped me learn the language.
One thing led to another, I went to college for CS, dropped out after a couple years and started freelancing. (Wrong choice folks, it was the hard road, I made pennies for my efforts trying to build a portfolio)
Eventually I got hired at my first salaried job, a Django agency as a full stack dev. Got to do some cool work. Hopped around in the agency world (some technical, some marketing), got tired of interacting with clients and doing any frontend work. Now I work on an energy demand/response product, am exclusively backend (and cloud-native), and fucking love my job.
So yeah, it started as a hobby, grew into a passion, and now I do what I love and get paid quite well for it. I also really enjoy building smart home devices.
Ive been learning for a year. I just want to get change careers because ive hit a cap in my earnings in my current one. The past year has been doing a bunch of fun python projects and javascript, and soaking in as much as I can.
Currently, working on codelabs and learning jetpack compose with Kotlin. It has been very fun learning this and a week in.
i gotta get out of this call center, but im ignoreing all the noise and following what makes me excited to learn, and right now thats android development lol.
I’ve been working professionally as a software engineer for a bit over 20 years, and I was programming as a hobby for over a decade before that. Been in a number of different industries; you can find interesting problems to work on anywhere, but life for a programmer is always best at a company whose primary business is software.
