Programming

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Professional, but I'm an engineer at heart and simply love all things engineering, including mechanical.

I started with C++ at school. I really liked it, but when it was time for summer I taught myself C# and that's how I got a job.

I'm currently migrating the backend of our company from relational to non relational DB, and a lot of other goodies.

Am sysadmin by trade. I started when my manager told me to add 1000 people to a group. This rapidly lead me to learning how to script and build tools for my team...

Then my team leader asked if I could make the tools run from a web site but only using free stuff. So html, js and php followed. MySQL when I wanted to start logging capabilities. 10 years later and now running on Laravel here we are!

I have been working as a web developer, now a manager and less of a coder, for over 20 years.

Whenever I get the chance to tell this story, I always credit the game Command and Conquer: Red Alert for beginning my journey into coding and web development. This was long before auto matchmaking, so to play with other people you had to know their IP address in order to connect directly. To help with this, there was a chat app that came with the game called Westwood Online. While at first it was used for the intended purpose, I also met my first "Internet girlfriend" in those chat rooms, back when such a thing was confusing and scandalous to my parents. Eventually I joined a Star Wars RPG "guild", and of course we needed a way to document to other guilds how amazing our imaginary spaceship collection was, so I volunteered to make a website. I wish I still had it, but just imagine a Geocites website with clunky frames and lots of pictures of different Star Destroyers or X-Wings.

After that I was absolutely hooked. Video games moved to the background and most of my solo free time was spent on various coding projects. I was fortunate enough to be in the first wave of "webmasters", starting with free hosting platforms like Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod. Anyone else remember web rings?? I don't remember now how I found it, but my first "real" coding experience was after joining a forum called NeoPages. I had to write an application and be interviewed first, but eventually was given FTP access to my very own website, no ads or limitations! That's really when my journey as a developer began. (I ended up being one of the primary administrators when I got older and the owner didn't have time, now in retrospect I can see how that was a very important learning experience.)

I started working at a local web design company in high school and continued working there part-time during the semester and full-time in the summers throughout college. I almost burned out from that due to an insanely manipulative and verbally abusive boss, but lucked into an even better job when I had a lunch with the former co-partner to the bad boss. I was really just looking for some advice as I got ready to graduate but I left that lunch with a job offer!

Fast forward to the 2008 financial crisis and the small business he was running, of which I was employee #3 for after his sister, ends up falling apart. Most of our business came from a marketing agency that was literally down the street, so they snatched up me and another developer to maintain the dozen sites we had built for them in the last few years. That place was chaotic at first, but the leadership at the top was smart enough to invest in digital before many of our competitors, letting things grow and then knowing when to pull back and focus on the business side of the process, too. (Fun story, the very first meeting I was part of after moving to the agency, still on contract and not a FTE yet, the owner of the whole agency comes in and tells us the last project was 300% over budget. I can't even imagine that happening now, at worst we would have realized something was wrong by the time we ended the first sprint!)

I've now been at that agency for 14 years as of last week! I never thought I would stay in one place or enjoy being a manager, but I've come to love the mentoring side of my job more than the technical side. Now that I am nearing my 40s, it's also nice to have a stable employer in a region that does not have many similar opportunities--most of our clients are out of state, so before the rise of remote working I would have had to moved away from my entire family to find an equivalent job (both in terms of the kind and quality of work we do and financially). I'm still learning new things all of the time, too, even if I am not necessarily the one writing code myself.

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

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.

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. For fun, I do some personal web stuff and embedded IoT for smart home bits & bobs.

Professional. I started out with Basic, then QBasic and Java in high school. Made a Geocities site.

Years later, I was bored and decided to learn Python. Had enough fun doing that that I decided to go to school for it.

Now I'm a full-time programmer, mostly doing web app stuff. I spend much, much less time doing programming for fun, but I'm a huge fan of learning new languages.

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.

Still a hobbyist hopefully moving to full time in the near future. Started with python & once i feel like i have a really good grasp of it, thinking of switching to Go or C/C++

Professional but even if I wasn't I'd still be coding for fun. Since having my first child I haven't done many side projects but my day job satisfies most of my development passion.

I develop/maintain a mammoth of a Frankenstein application that used in the trucking/shipping industry. The main bones are built in perl/mysql but there's some PHP, Python, React, and for a reason no one knows, an ASP/C# portion.

I personally love the wide range of tickets and languages I get to mess around with. I'm currently taking elastic courses to get certified paid for by the company which has been great.

Professional FE engineer working in game dev.

Started out on Marapets with mostly HTML, learnt a bit of CSS when I got on Tumblr, then took a 3D modelling class in highschool. Decided I liked it, so I kept going and did a degree in game development & design. Joined a really small team at a consulting firm doing normal corporate contract stuff, where they trained me up across a few different languages, got me talking to clients, etc etc. Really, really good experience. During the pandemic, I left them (regretfully, but I needed to grow - they have my number, always) and did a year at a much larger company as a full-stack engineer with a focus on FE, and switched jobs when management grew toxic. Also did a lot of hobbyist CSS work on a writing site, got really damn good at it there.

Was going to join a design firm on their FE team, but a friend reached out and asked if I wanted to work in game dev instead. So... there was barely even a question there. I fucking love my job.

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 enough workout apps already 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%' and Type = 'file') 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 handy.

Professional. I was a software developer for 4 years on the Microsoft stack. I am now a Product Architect.

I've been a professional software engineer in the game industry for 22 years now. I started off in school at first on Apple computers with Basic, then when I got a graphing calculator in school I started writing tools for school work and games on it all the time. After college, I wasn't sure what sort of software I wanted to work on (dot-com era), but one of my good friends talked me into applying to some game companies. I've been in a bunch of different companies since then but right now I'm working on online systems for one of the biggest online games.

Professional on a haitus here. Fully self taught, done a ton of hobby projects, most of my fleshed out ones being in either C89 or C99. Most recently has been a calculator application for myself in X11 too brush off the rust on my X11 knowledge, as well as a Lemmy client library for C.

I studied it before back in 08-09. Then I stepped away and did other things but came right back to it. Finishing my CS degree this December :)

I’m hoping to be a professional software engineer.

self taught webdev here
as part of a devops course, I built a cool little ninite-inspired sveltekit app that lets you generate a script for installing Homebrew and any apps and packages you want automatically on Macs!
currently hosted on vercel (i'm not good at devops), no plans for ads to be included or anything! source code is available here, and brewskie is right this way!
would love to get some feedback, i'm sure there are ways this can be done a lot better haha

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.

I'm a software engineer, but I'm still pretty early in my career and have done mostly QA. I'm currently being integrated into a new team where I'll actually get to develop on a C# and Angular project! I've done a little dev work on a much smaller Angular project so I'm really excited.

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.

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 have been a professional software developer/engineer for since 2010. I have worked in a few different industries, in a variety of programming languages and have done work concentrating on both front end and back end.

Right now, I am working for a large company and helping build their commercial web offering.

I love to code, but suck at coming up with ideas haha

I consider myself both but I'm progressively leaning more and more professional.

First off, I'm 100% self-taught. I discovered Linux around 2003 and immediately learned, several times, how not to install it and multiple really good ways of destroying data on a hard drive. I have had the open source / Linux bug ever since.

I went to school for CS for about two semesters before I dropped out. I then started off my career in IT of all places, I was a helpdesk IT administrator. About 12 years ago I landed a job where most of my responsibilities revolved around Linux servers and workstations (academic research lab). I started learning more about systems automation and configuration management tools/languages/strategies. This constantly lead me down roads involving reading source code for projects that I used day-to-day when something didn't go right. This lead to filing bug reports and ultimately making a pull-request here or there to fix my own issues.

Fast forward two jobs and 10 years and I've migrated to a role where the majority of my day is writing systems code. Most of it is in Go now but I still maintain a handful of Python/Django applications as well. The majority of the tools I write for work are focused on developer experience, cloud automation and internal CI/CD pipelines. In my personal time, I contribute to a number of open source projects.

I’ve always wanted to learn to code ever since my first computer: an Atari 800. In middle school I learned Turbo Pascal and then on to college. Software engineer and now software architect has been my career ever since.

After a day of meetings and coding for “the man”, I rarely have the energy to code on my own. If I do, it’s usually in pursuit of another hobby such as my home lab.

I'm a professional, I went to uni where I learned some theoretical computer science as well as to code properly (although I'd been a casual hobbyist a year or so before) and have been in the industry ever since as a software engineer. I've always been primarily focussed on the backend but I could keep a postgres database ticking over if push came to shove and I'm currently cross-training to do some operations stuff too as I don't think I've ever worked on a team with enough staff let alone a reasonable bus factor in my life. I'm definitely a startups person too at least for the time being, job security's been pretty dreadful lately but I'll take insecure but interesting work over safe and boring for now while I don't have a house or kids to worry about.

At the moment I'm working for a medtech company using AI to speed up cancer diagnoses, really cool stuff that I'd probably have palmed off as the press sensationalising things if I hadn't seen it work first hand.

Been keenly working on my own indie games, focusing primarily around Unity. It's been great to leverage my skills and make something fun to play.

I released a low poly city builder a few years back and I'm always looking at ways to polish it up.

I've worked on a range of websites, apps and extensions but creating a game from scratch has been one of the hardest things I've ever done.

Professional C developer (Firmware Engineer). Also do a lot of work with ASM, and some Python in there, too. I’ve always loved it, though, and sometimes do it for fun as well. Programming Arduinos in C++ and the like.

I actually started later in high school at some summer camp doing C++ and fell in love from there. Since, I’ve learned C/C++, Java, Python, HTML/CSS, et cetera. But my favorite language remains C++!

Really I would consider myself both, but to answer the question you're actually asking Professional.

I've known that software development was what I wanted to do since early in high school, programming has been a large part of my life since then.

I'm working on Ruby on Rails stuff these days, but Python is my true love. I also have a goofy website that I enjoy hacking on.

I'm a professional. I'm currently working on some side projects like storybot, a blog written only by AI or ai-guessr, wordle but with AI images.

I did some years of Game Development, but mainly it was a mix of having a first job where I had to "learn how to learn" and then working a lot on side projects.

I find that side projects is the main way to learn and experiment. In a corporate job you can't experiment (and break stuff so much) so someone that codes as a hobby has experienced way more situations that could work in a professional environment.