How did you learn to code for the first time?

My first program :)

**** COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2 ****

64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE

READY.

10 PRINT "HELLO"

20 GOTO 10

RUN

HELLO

HELLO

HELLO

HELLO

...

I don't quite remember how I got this far, I think the computer's manual had a little tutorial. And it's interesting, I never got any good at C64 programming. But I guess the seed was planted.

Yep, self-taught and working on projects that I was passionate about. The very first time was building a wordpress site for a book club I was in, to share articles and stuff. No intention of doing it professionally, but it got me addicted!

I did a written interview about how I learned to code for a site called icodehireme.com, and they are dedicated to sharing stories of people's coding journeys through written and podcast interviews. Worth a look

Two years ago, at 37yo, studying fulltime on www.freecodecamp.org

If someone want to read about it with (a lot of) more details:

https://rodrigohgpontes.github.io

Long time ago ;)

Primarily self taught, I bought a book on Visual Basic back then. I think it was the most expensive book I ever bought to this day.

Coded away on fun projects for myself mainly.

Had no clue about libraries and standard classes. Re-Invented wheels all the time. I remember coding a timer which counted the duration of minutes you are "connected to the internet" - and not sure why, but I recall not using any default time libraries but calculating minutes and hours myself, based on the one function I found DateTime.Now or whatever ;-)

No clue why I did not come to the idea that somebody on the internet made information like that available. I did not bother to search for it. Well, "Googling" wasn't a thing yet.

After a few years I did a website in PHP, I felt pretty awesome accessing the database ...

Fun times. Thanks for reminding me!

Hello @vidythatte.

I normally don't reply to non-business related questions, however your question brought back some great memories so I will honour them.

My dad bought me a Speccy+ in 1984. I would type the program listings that were in C+VG. Unfortunately my first attempt was way off.

I didn't realise you had to hit Enter at the end of each line, so I was typing, and putting spaces in to get to the next line on the screen. Only when the screen filled up, and I was unable to add any more text did I realise I was doing something wrong.

Cheers, Ace.

I had always been fascinated by computers from a young age and thought that one had to be a super genius to write code or have a tonne of academic accolades in computer science. So it came as a surprise to me at the age of around 14 reading about some 10 year old hacker. My reaction was "what? If a ten year old kid can write code without any formal training, then what am I doing with my life at 14?", followed by a mild existential crisis.Coincidentally, at around the same time I had picked up a book from my dad's library called "Mastery" by Robert Greene.What I largely got from it was that it was not by chance that people were inclined towards certain things in life, like my fascination with these machines called computers.I scoured the internet on articles on how to start coding and everyone was advising on starting with html on those old internet forums that looked like crime scenes lol(thank God for modern front end frameworks).

Over the years I've picked up and taught myself several programming languages and finally decided to settle on Python.

We had no internet at home but we had a computer lol.

I was like... What else can you do on it besides play a single player game or write an essay? Oh you mean to tell me you can actually make websites using just your computer? I thought you needed to be some massive company like America Online!

The local library had good books on programming so I just borrowed one and followed the book. It’s amazing the kind of books you can get for free at the library. Literally just free knowledge. Barnes and noble would sell the same books for $50. Anyways, if I needed an image I had to go to the library and save it onto a floppy. Still, I had my first hello world in short order.

Too bad I couldn’t publish it.

Initially using the "Apple Media Tool" GUI to create "interactive CD-ROMS". You could switch to "code view". Then using Adobe's "Pagemill" to view the source of HTML documents.

Those tools gave me some insight into how code worked. After that I bought a books by "Selena Sol" and Steven E. Brenner on creating Perl CGI scripts. From there I bought some O`Reilly books, "Learning Perl" and "Programming Perl".

Once I had a grasp of Perl other languages like Python and Javascript were pretty easy to work with.

All self-taught.

I started on spreadsheet macros in order to solve specific problems at work back in the days when I was a corporate rat.

I found myself in the peculiar position of being resented for spending work time learning how to do things that my various departments came to rely on.

I have never been at ease with corporate mentality.

Depends what you call programming, so I'll include a few historical notes before I get to the textual code part.

---

My dad was a Polish-French immigrant to the US and he arrived without a high school diploma. He was a ski instructor but was fascinated with the early days of "personal computers" -- so much so that he got a job working the night shift at the local IBM plant and bought an Apple II+ in 1980. In 1982, at the age of 5, I began playing chess against the computer and soon managed to beat the beginner level consistently (I learned by using CTRL-Z an awful lot).

I also became obsessed with Zork around the same time. My dad and I spent a lot of time on the computer. I was playing games, and he was teaching himself how to use databases and learning BASIC. He shared his early successes with me and I began learning it as well. I think I wrote my first "Choose Your Own Adventure" style game in 1983 at the age of 6. It was super super simple and I was proud of my rudimentary accomplishment and promptly forgot about it as I began to discover more sophisticated games -- that was my last attempt at textual code for a very long time.

Later on, in 1984 or so, my dad was trying to understand the circuits that he was helping to build on the night shift. He wanted to work his way up to a desk job. He bought two educational games: Rocky's Boot and Robot Odyssey.

Rocky's Boot Walkthrough

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-NLh58bIIk

Robot Odyssey Walkthrough

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJeseZEZn6Y&list=PLAA01B4CB4E37EC96

They were both adventure games to teach concepts of electrical engineering, logic gates, and circuit design. In Robot Odyssey, you built a circuit for a robot to complete challenges by assembling logic gates and using repeatable chips to create programs (OOP!). My dad used to print out the templates of the robot interiors and we would try to sketch out the solutions to the obstacle robot courses together. I don't really know how much I helped, but I was really into it, we used to spend whole days doing it.

I got really into pirate BBSes in my early teens and got obsessed with games and (ahem) other things, and forgot about programming. I ended up getting an English degree with minors in film and psychology, and eventually a masters in Architecture. It wasn't until my last year of grad school that I discovered Explicit History, a visual programming environment for a 3d modeling platform called Rhino 3d. It was so intuitive and amazing, I was able to automate all of these redundant modeling tasks that made design work so slow and painful during those all nighters. The platform was renamed to Grasshopper, and I participated in the early forums while it was being developed, actively contributing feature requests, suggestions, trying to learn more from the community. I was one of the earliest adopters of the platform in the architecture industry, and it became a kind of specialization for me. I had a typical software engineer attitude in some ways (although I didn't know it at the time), in that I never wanted to do the same repetitive task twice. So I automated a lot of my work, wherever I could.

It didn't really click until later that all of that early stuff was crucial to my understanding and ability to work with visual programming, but I now credit those early experiences with developing my critical thinking in logic and control flow.

Fast forward to 2013, when I was invited to join a Silicon Valley startup. It was there that I finally got in to textual code for real. I was working with brilliant SWEs, and I took the opportunity to learn from them as best I could. My first actual code project was an absolute Silicon Valley cliche -- I used a company hackathon to start building a Ping Pong score tracker for our startup. It doesn't matter that it was a cliche, for a couple reasons -- I didn't know it at the time, and I absolutely loved doing it. A snapshot of what I ended up building (we used it a LOT):

http://www.marcsyp.com/#/rivals-io/

To build it, I learned HTML/CSS from General Assembly's Dash online school (highly recommended!), and I was one of the first users of their Javascript program as well. I did all the Javascript 101 stuff online, and I tried to limit the questions for colleagues to the harder stuff I just couldn't get alone from the internet at the time. I learned how to use callbacks and promises from the inventor of Google Street View. Not typically a resource the average non-CS person has when learning to code, so I got lucky.

I now write Javascript, Typescript, C#, and Python regularly, and I just built my first backend server in NodeJS + Express, which is the basis of the first startup that I will actually be launching (keep your eyes peeled for Hashgear).

https://www.hashgear.shop

It's been a long road, and I'm nowhere near as talented as many of the programmers I've run across in this life, but I really enjoy it, I can get shit done, and I've managed to carve out a pretty good living with my unique set of skills in the design + code worlds.

Thanks for providing this opportunity to stroll down memory lane! And sorry for being so longwinded. :)

Cheers,

Marc

As a kid in the '80s, I taught myself BASIC, on an Apple ][e, by typing in every program listing I could get my hands on, and seeing what magic happened when RUN. I really wanted to learn 6502 assembly, to write my own games, but couldn't get my head around it, at that age (with just a book and occasional consultation with my uncle back in the days of expensive, per-minute long distance phone calls). I went to college, got a CS degree, and have been working in the web development world ever since. And 30 years after my first foray into 6502 assembly, I finally built (the VERY humble beginnings of) a game (https://devonostendorf.com/category/retrochallenge2018/)!

I have Electrical Engineering background. I did not know how to write a single line of code when I got my M.S degree. I started working as a Technical Support Engineer. I was shocked by the poor software quality. I volunteered for projects to work outside my regular hours at work. A simple data migration project in Oracle. I started writing CGI scripts using Perl with the Sybase database in 1997. The pay was low but I was learning a lot at work. I also took UC California Berkley extension courses in Java. Started to develop web apps using servlets, JSP, Struts and Hibernate. I realized pure theoretical or practical approach has its drawbacks, I created : http://www.codingskill.net/ to help other developers find their current learning trajectory and to accelerate their learning curve to acquire coding skills.

Self thought, working on hobby projects. I wrote a game.

I’m just starting to learn to code and I’ve been using laracasts mainly. I’ve tried a few different online tutorials but found this the best one.

I somehow randomly stumbled upon a simple manual about how to build websites when I was about 12 years old. That literally changed my life, I thought it was the coolest thing ever haha :D

After that I built some sites just for fun, then got some small freelancing gigs and eventually landed my first job as a developer.

It's not really coding, but I bought an HTML5/CSS template, downloaded a free text editor (I like Brackets - http://brackets.io/ - right now) and then started changing everything saving it, opening the local files in a browser to see what's different, undoing changes I didn't like, etc.

Then whenever I'd see something cool on a site, I'd check their source code and then see if I could recreate and then manipulate it. Stackoverflow was a big help.

Then some cheap video courses on Javascript and PHP, and so on.

Good luck!

I was very active on a particular gaming forum and saw some people type in formatted text. I asked around how to do that and someone replied 'just use html bruv'.

So I went to a local library, got a big black book on html, read it and here I am.

Learned Basic, then Pascal but profesionally the first was Actionscript and then Javascript. Basically all from places like Youtube and various websites.

I learnt most of the programming languages by myself. Never watched any video on YouTube or taken any programming course. I always read tutorials and start practicing based on I understand. Afterwards, I create a small project in that programming language for thorough understanding.

I believe the best way to learn any programming language is through practice. It does not matter how many videos you watch on YouTube or read articles on different sites, ultimately you have to write the code. The sooner you start writing code, the better.

My advice for newbies: Open your favorite editor and start writing code right away based on what you understand from any video or a tutorial. Try to compile/run the code to see the results. Don't be afraid of errors and bugs. It is normal.

I had a somewhat similar experience Luke did when I was a very little kid. One of my uncles moved in with us to save money and he had a Commodore 64. I never really learned how to program until much later, though.

The real beginning was when Kongregate.com released a "How to make a flash game" tutorial in 2010. I followed along with it and had a simple side scrolling spaceship shooter game created in just one day!

The tutorial used AS2 (which was very similar to JavaScript). It kind of sucked because everyone was moving to AS3 at the time for better performance and that language was more like Dart or TypeScript. It took a lot more work to get anything done, especially as a beginner who didn't have any OO background, so just porting the game I'd already made took 3 games. After that, I made a Breakout clone and a Tetris clone. Then had just enough skill to join a startup in a semi-technical role in Beijing and have been learning ever since.

My first lines of code was only a few years ago. I used to make large numbers of images with simple difference like the date and place mentioned on those images.

I desperately needed someway to automate this process and that's when I found out about JavaScript and the Canvas element.

I think I speak for most first time programmers here, it's an astounding feeling when you see something you built works better then you expected.

Like everyone says, the rest is history.

QBASIC on Dos using a tutorial my dad printed out for me. First real program was a text-based trivia game, really wish I still had the code somewhere.

Became fascinated and obsessed with custom android roms and wanting the latest android os. Had to learn C, Java, and XML to port and customize from Verizon to Sprint.

I learned by reading articles on xda developers and a book on android and android roms from Barnes and Nobles.

I found Java hard and programming in general so I researched the easiest way to learn programming and the easiest languages. Many articles said to start with front-end HTML/CSS/Javascript. I watched a couple of youtube videos but wanted hands on. suddenly came across code academy hour of code. Within 1 hour they taught you how to make a webpage with your name and exploding hover animations. I did that, fell in love. Started taking Codeacemy and treehouse classes simultaneously, then started messing with chrome dev tools and redesigning websites for practice then creating dummy websites locally, mainly in css and javascript.

Self-taught with helps from friends.

I get a friend to teach me. He taught me simple HTML and CSS and pointed me to use Bootstrap to create simple websites. But then I guess it was too hard to explain a lot of things to me and I’ve had endless questions about how things work. So he stopped teaching me.

I then found out about Treehouse. That was about 4-5 years ago. And I immediately signed up for the membership. I spent the first three months learning and practicing for 2 to 3 hours a day. Then I got back to that friends and he started passing me some small gigs from his freelance clients.

I did close a few freelance gigs after that but then I stopped freelancing a year later. Now, I code mainly for my personal projects and sometimes for marketing campaigns I run at Sumo.

My skills are still very limited. I’m planning to schedule a few hours every week to pick up coding again. Or start some small interesting projects on the side for practice purposes.

Selft taught by learning on codecademy.com and youtube video. Then working as freelance,working on various projects to make money and gain some experience

W3Schools, PHPFreaks, StackOverflow, Other forums

Tried to get rich making high traffic websites, mostly had dumb ideas, did not pan out in that sense. Eventually became a full stack developer just because I wanted to build everything/every aspect of a website... like talking to GoDaddy support people about how to generate a CSR and what not. Now I work as a dev, dream of being an entrepreneur but still not really having any ideas to make yet. Learned a lot though, laughed at how little I knew(still not know).

So I repeatedly hit wall after wall trying to grok this stuff when I first started.

It seemed like an impossible problem that I could never find the edge of...

Looking back on it, I think the real problem was my strategy for getting a foot in the door.

"A foot in the door..." maybe that phrase itself kind of self-reflexively conveys the essence of the problem; I was working under the idea that there was some kind of door you walked through & you were "in." It was a destination.

It took a long, long time for me to figure out that there is no destination... you're never "there." After 15+ years of doing this stuff professionally I still learn new stuff... and that's probably the best part of doing this stuff.

But more concretely, I'd say I first learned to code when I

1. gave myself a practical project to work on and

2. gave myself permission to be bad at this stuff to start with

For me it was 20years ago..1998, I just got myself a PC merely to connect to IRC to chat out of loneliness. Then I stumbled into some story of young kid programmed a calculator for his dad. I was curious how he did that, turn out he was using Visual Basic.

I bought the installer and tried to build something with it, thats how I learned how to code for the 1st time. There was a popular tutorial site at the time, planet-source-code.com, copying other people's code and learned from it.

Around year 2001 someone suggested me to look into PHP, and I was hooked till now.

20 years ago I had planned on a career as a network tech, but I had an extreme interest in the web. I had played around with doing websites for people on the side as a hobby. Just by sure curiosity I answered a local job add for a web developer. I had absolutely no programming experience other than I previously read some programming books for fun on occasion. I found it all pretty fascinating. Anyways, I got the job for $12/hour (lolz) working for a online travel agency startup working with ColdFusion (back when it was owned by Allaire). Ever since then I was hooked and haven't looked back!

I started off around 7 years ago trying to build things in HTML and Scratch for fun (and learned a very small amount of Java and Python too), but didn't really start taking it seriously until maybe 4 years ago.

Originally I was trying to use The Odin Project to learn Ruby on Rails, but I couldn't quite get it to click. Moved on to full-stack JavaScript development and just started trying to build things that were beyond my skill level. I built projects without fully understanding what I was doing at first, learned as I went, and rebuilt things if I realized what I was doing wasn't working.

Codecademy was a good resource for getting started, but after that starting point, I learned a lot more from building things (and watching/reading 5 free courses on the same topic) and finding what worked best. Trying to do something that's beyond your skill level - but not so much that you have no idea where to start - is what I would recommend most.

Coded game levels/areas in C for a Diku MUDD in the early 90's when I was a 12-13. Had no Idea what C was, I just followed the instructions/examples. Finally learned HTML in in college in the early 2000's, PHP and js soon after. All via books/examples and later, google.

This is always a fun question that mostly discourages those who ask because they are already doubting themselves.

Anyways for my starts, I guess I took the rather beaten path. Started dabbling with computer early on, one thing leads to another and basically started with BASIC at the age of 12ish or so. From there I felt it came very natural to me and only grew from there. Now at some 12-13 years in, not really sure how else it would work out for me.

However words of encouragement as most of you asking are past this early start, let me tell you that I have a lot of friends and colleagues that are top notch tier and they started fairly late or from a completely different domain. Seems like being older has its perks as you have a more systematic approach and better ability to grasp concepts. There is a time in your teens where you know so much but so little and you simply have to mature a bit before you can "get" stuff. The one distinguishing feature between those who do and those who don't is literally the will to invest some time into it and get started. Once you do it just sucks you in. You start to understand that computers are nothing different from a very sophisticated hammer and the only purpose is to automate stuff, you just have to be very specific on what and how.

Hope this keeps everyone doubting whether they are fit or not to know there's a place for everyone. Programming is a tool and only some have to go to "expert level" others can just be users of the tool. You don't have to know how to build a car in order to use it and both are fairly complex in their own way.

With that said, I really do appreciate people with a very deep understanding of Computer Science and underlying principles but that's another story.

AppleScript on my Peforma 1080 CD, then RealBasic.

In school, in visual basic.

As an adult: codecademy.com, learnpythonthehardway.org, godjango.com and youtube.com.

Self-taught, made tens of personal projects.

Self taught ~2000 or 2001. Learned on a TI-85 calculator.

The very first time was in the 80s, learning AppleSoft BASIC. 20 years later I needed to make a web page dynamic and learned some Perl using books and web sites. That led to PHP, Python, Android, and most recently Node. Every step along the way I chose an open source language that would best suit my needs. Eventually, books fell away in favor of online tutorials and educational sites. Lately I lean heavily on FrontendMasters (https://frontendmasters.com/) and Wes Bos's courses (https://wesbos.com/courses/).

The first code i wrote was a calculator that runs on CLI. It was an example from C book. I was twelve in that time and found it boring because already have a calculator with gui on my pc. :) Hence didn't go far.

Few years later, installed v-bulletin to my website and had needed to edit plugins and themes that i use. So i started web development with PHP.

I hit my 'self-taught' ceiling pretty quickly, and found a free month long JS course that hack reactor was running where I live. Once I wrapped that up, I knew I had the bug an went to a 3 month boot camp program.

Between the two I felt like I had a solid foundation and have been working on projects and picking up new skills on my own since then.

I was a Math major in college and had two programming courses that taught some fundamentals, but I started to re-learn how to program four years later. Here's what I did.

Harvard's CS50 course on EdX is probably the single best overview of how to program from scratch that I've come across. I took this first:

https://www.edx.org/course/cs50s-introduction-computer-science-harvardx-cs50x

It’s self-paced and starts at the most basic level. It’s pretty famous - if you tell people that you took Harvard’s CS50 course with David Malan, a lot of people will know what you’re talking about.

I planned to build an app, so I jumped right into this next course. It taught React Native (a friend suggested that would be a good starting point for an MVP), and is project-based, which I've always found to be a good way to learn. There are some other great Udemy and Coursera courses, but this is the one I took:

https://www.udemy.com/the-complete-react-native-and-redux-course/learn/v4/overview

My plan was to take a bunch of "Build Snapchat/Instagram/Uber in React Native" style courses and kind of Frankenstein-build my app from those. I'd explore some courses on Udemy until you find ones that interest you.

Lastly, after I was more confident in my programming ability and just wanted to get a landing page built for my site, I took several courses on the Learn Enough to be Dangerous series:

https://www.learnenough.com/courses

It's probably the best/quickest/most efficient way to get started if you have basic programming knowledge. I go back to them as a refresher quite often. I just noticed that he put up the Javascript course, so you can learn the basic web stack (HTML, CSS, Javascript) in a few days if you were aggressive.

Best of all these are all free! Hope this helps!

When I was a child 13-14 years old, I wanted to make games, I searched a bit and found RPG Maker. There came a time when the default features of the software were not enough and PUM! the code appeared.

Since then I have not stopped programming, I am 23 now.

I attended a 2-year coding school called Holberton (https://www.holbertonschool.com/)! They use a deferred tuition model where you don't pay a cent until you have a job (17% of your salary for 3 years with an $80K cap). I liked the school so much so that I'm now working at Holberton as their 3rd software engineer :)

I started when I was a kid with the Arduino, later moved onto C and even played around with assembly. Teaching myself pointers at age 14 was a hell of a ride.