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52 Comments

Developers of Indie Hackers, how did you learn to code?

I'm just curious about your start!

on August 18, 2023
  1. 6

    I had a very old (even at that time) "home computer", Commodore 64. And I started to to silly programs using BASIC (like mimicking an ATM - causing my older cousin to freak out when I pretended to withdraw money from her account 😂). This was when I was about 12 years old. The I got an Amiga 500 (and later a 1200) and started a bit with C.

    Actually, on the Amiga I did my first successful "indie project". And I recently found an old scan of a computer magazine where the applications was featured (for nostalgi, I put together a text Indie hacking - in 1995! here on Indiehackers.

    Moving on I did learn some assembly (it was either that or BASIC). Fast forward to the later 90'ies and I did Windows stuff using Delphi, and "dynamic webpages" using Perl and CGI-scripts.

    After working for a while as a "webmaster" and then in the video game industry I went to university to study computer science (by then I decided that programming, and building stuff, was the most fun thing ever so I wanted to learn even more).

    1. 2

      I also started out on the C64 as a child, tinkering with BASIC and typing out programs from magazines. Next was an Amiga 600. I used an Amiga 1200 for a few years while learning to code "properly" at university.

      1. 1

        It is THE path to get started for people being teenagers during the early 90'ies. The "demo scene" was quite popular in Europe at that time, and fun thing is that when pitching VCs at my previous company, pretty much every time the "tech person" at the VC had also been part of the demo scene (or knew about it). So instant connection! 🙂

    2. 1

      Thank you so much for sharing this amazing story, Do you've any tips for a beginner?

      1. 1

        Start with something simple, and then add more and more. Everything you do will make you learn something. Frustration and confusion is ok - it is a signing of learning. :) If you get stuck, take a step back and try something less complex.

        To aim to have your first programming project ever also to become a commercial success creates a lot of pressure and for sure will cause you to get stuck.

  2. 2

    Hey, maybe in these times it's worth getting interested in No-Code? You can start quick and if you love it great and if you don't then start learning to code to do more advanced stuff. Good luck anyway!

  3. 2

    I started learning html and css but then switched to Wordpress to create websites. They were extremely basic but by using a theme builder I could make them look how I wanted rather than just installing a Wordpress theme. This took the 'coding' element away from me and I had no need to learn PHP.

    I made websites for friends and family for free. These were often 4 page websites with Home, About, Services, Contact pages. I then started charging for these website for new clients - but only for hosting. I wouldn't take money until the site was finished and live as I was terrified people were going to rip into my sites and ask for refund. I also charged way too little (£150 per year and this included the custom domain and email addresses).

    I made over 20 websites over the course of 8 years. This was just something on the side as I had a full-time job.

    A friend worked at a software company and they hired people who are interested in technology and they train them up for 3 months to their standards. I decided to apply so spent 6 months learning Python in my spare time. I made a few web scraping scripts and auto emailers. I took their tech test using Python.

    I was a successful applicant and the company took me through their training for 3 months (along with 20 other people). I think the fact I'd built websites, found clients, dealt with all the faff that comes with dealing with clients, sealed the deal for me. I was joining a consultancy, so coding is only half they job - I had the people skills, too.

    I'm now a .Net developer.

  4. 2

    I started with other goal and coding just happen to part of things I need to learn to achieve it.

    It should be how everybody who want to learn coding do it. Because programming is never ending learning and its very hard to know everything.

    For my case I want to first learn it so I can make my own website. And after I manage to make and deploy one, I learn how to make a webapp to find a job.

    It is faster to do that way. It only takes me 6 month from not a programmer to a software engineer at a bank. But of course it takes a lot of work and mostly I spend time on youtube and articles, which is enough to get you started and land a decent job or get your project going.

    I believe everybody should learn and follow the learning for the outcome output else you will just learn without applying it. Here is an article about it if you interested to learn The most Effective Way of Learning: Set Goals, Learn, Achieve Goals, Set New Goals and Repeat.

    Essentially you learn until you manage to get the outcome you want and then move on to the next outcome.

    Its always better thats way else you will be stuck in the analysis paralysis or learning without any application

  5. 2

    In 2009 I used to install so many .jar games in my old motorola e398. One of the games was Need for Speed Undercover. Some how I have noticed that I could open the .jar files on my computer, edit the sprites on Paint, then compact the file to .jar back. So it was very funy to see my friends face when I started the game and the graphics was completely customized, like walls and outdoors with my name. It was very exciting.

    After a while I started being interested on game mechanics and some how I googled till find key words like java, JVM, JDK, Java Swing, compilers, command line commands etc. Here I am.

    1. 1

      Thank you so much for sharing. Well, it was fun, right?

  6. 2

    I learned to code Python during my Uni.

    I was studying applied maths and I'm grateful I learned to code there.

    The best thing that could happen cause it turned out I'm not that good at maths.

    1. 2

      Thank you for sharing, actually I learned it from reading books, then I started creating, and it is fun....

      1. 1

        Yes, it is! More than it was learning maths for me...

  7. 2

    The good people of YouTube, medium, stackoverflow, etc.. But I only learned when I started building, stumbling, deleting everything and starting over, and dealing with a lot of emotions -mainly existential dread, self-loathing, and boredom- (when I say dealing, I mean acknowledging the emotion, then going back anyways).. Still learning!

    1. 1

      Keep going! I'm also learning so anyways, let's get to the top!

  8. 2

    I started at the age of 12 by making changes to MSDOS BASIC games like Nibbles and Gorilla. The first game I made by myself was a Space Invaders clone copied from a book I borrowed from the school library.

    Soon after that I made friends with kids who had similar interests and we worked on lots of random projects together. At one point we had an early prototype of something resembling WinZip but the computer crashed and we lost everything.

    At the end of high school I was making software for the school to help the teachers do roll call. My first job out of school was at a local computer store and I made a program to help a DJ keep track of his music collection that we sold.

    1. 1

      That's so cool doing something in a group is really fun right? maybe I should reach out to some ppl and do a project with them.

      1. 1

        It's been quite a few years since I've worked in a group but I have fond memories of the good old days. Most of my close friends have their own lives going on nowadays.

  9. 2

    Technically, I did a computer science school. But I "really" learned to code with 2 things:

    • working in an IT Services company (handling multiple projects concurrently, with different stacks, deadlines and team members)

    • working on side projects (learning new skills, making projects from A to Z, understanding what "UX" and "marketing" really mean and their strong synergy with the development part, ...)

    So I would say that to learn coding, I needed to have use cases that forced me to search how to make stuff.

    1. 1

      Strongly agree, my only regret was not starting early!

  10. 2

    Bootcamp. Best decision for me as teaching myself was just taking too long

    1. 1

      If you have the opportunity to give a bit of advice to your past self(5 years in the past), what would it be?

      1. 1

        Build more! It's the best way to learn and push your skills

        1. 1

          I think that the formula is right. Build more, Earn More.

    1. 1

      ikr like solving each problem was the teacher for most developers! And w3school were very helpful...

  11. 2

    99.999% wherever the Google search points me. Lately though, ChatGPT and phind.com have been nifty tools for learning new stuff.

    1. 1

      Actually, I think developers are meant to be entrepreneurs bc we solve problems daily more than anybody lol

  12. 1

    I’ve not yet learned it. But I am in the process of learning SwiftUI through online Udemy courses. I’m currently 2 months into the journey. It’s not easy, but with doing a bit everyday I’m going slowly forward. For me the fact that a lot of the lessons are only 10-20 minutes makes it easier to squeeze the learning in the free time that I have during the day. I will also start on my own projects soon after I am confident enough with the basics. So I can learn while doing and figure out problems on my own.

  13. 1

    Almost dropped out of university until I discovered coding. I did the entire freeCodeCamp frontend course and then just started building project after project myself. My learning curve felt slower than most, it took about 1.5 years before I felt remotely confident at work. It then took another year until I gained full-stack typescript knowledge to be able to make an entire web app.

  14. 1

    I learnt as an autodidact 10 years ago. I followed courses in video games and mobile development. I was stil a junior developer when I joined a digital marketing startup. I met my cofounder and 7 years ago launched our web / mobile agency. I knew nothing about web development before but I am a full stack web developer now. Making projects from start to end.

  15. 1

    My path was like this:

    • MS DOS 6.22 with qBasic and Turbo Pascal
    • Windows 3.11 with Borland C
    • Windows 98 with Turbo C, NASM (playing with winApi from assembler)
    • ArchLinux with GCC, Python, Perl, Ruby
    • Fedora with C, Python, Perl, Java, Ruby, Golang, JS/TS and Rust lately
  16. 1

    I am still learning and far from being an expert.
    The most important thing for me was to make it fun. I had some basics on hand from my studies where I did some courses on the side, but I really learned to code the most when trying out game development.
    Sure, I have a lot to catch up when it comes to web application and other frameworks, but it really helped me to understand OOP, because it comes really naturally since your classes often times represent "real" objects. And as I said, it was/is fun :)

  17. 1

    How? It's easy, just start and keep going for several years. The path is long and hard. There are no shortcuts, just keep going till you get some position. Pick some programming language and start doing courses or learning from books. That's the whole secret.

  18. 1

    I started with c and c++ but it was too boring, then i stumbled upon html, css and javascript (jquery), 10 years ago in 2012, and i never looked back, i could create something i could see. It changed my life.

    1. 1

      Ikr, Thank you for sharing your story!

  19. 1

    I have been programming since the age of 7-8 and working on software development professionally for around 25 years.

    I got started with building mostly simple games until I was 13-14 years old, then one day I lost a lot of source code due to a virus; I remember I cried, but that day I learned the importance of good backups.

    Also that day, I vowed to learn how computer viruses work. So I spent a ridiculous amount of time collecting viruses and reverse engineering them to learn various techniques used to infect programs, documents, disks (at the time) and so on.

    As a natural consequence I wrote myself many viruses, and some very "successful" ones spread like crazy even worldwide before ending up in the major antivirus programs' databases and becoming a thing of the past.

    So I learned to implement polymorphism and other techniques to make it more difficult for antivirus programs to detect them.

    I apologise if you were ever affected by one of my viruses :-/

    But... one thing led to another and I started to be more and more interested in security too, so I built some tools to automate exploiting some vulnerabilities that were common to web applications, such as SQL injections and others, before these became popular.

    I was kinda walking a dangerous path until someone wise made me reconsider what I was doing and what I would like to do with my life in general.

    So I stopped doing that kind of stuff and started using my technical skills to develop genuine software and web applications as a job.

    Over the years I have worked on many different types of products and systems, from applications to manage stock to accounting web apps, from booking engines for the travel industry to advertising and lead generation, from cloud management/CDN/storage products to an event management platform at my current day job.

    Over the years my interest in viruses faded while my interest in web app security grew stronger, so finally I am now preparing to a couple of certifications with OffSec (Offensive Security).

    I am also very much interested in DevOps (especially Kubernetes) and Machine Learning/AI.

    If you are curious, I write about this kind of topics on my blog at https://vitobotta.com.

  20. 1

    Studied Computer Science, and signed up for a free class in Python which sparks my curiosity. After each lecture we had exercises. In order to get a certificate at the end I needed to submit all exercises and go through an exam. My inspiration and interest were boosted after each exercise. Everyone can learn it just start and get your hands dirty!

  21. 1

    I began learning how to code in Javascript when I was 11, hoping to pursue video game development. Six months later with JS in the bag, I began using my newfound skills to experiment with video game creation, using engines such as Unity.

    However, I discovered this path wasn't for me, and much preferred the idea of creating AI, so I taught myself python on codecademy. I then learnt machine learning & data science from Youtube and computer science books from the library. After that, I spent the next few years posting solutions for data visualisations and machine learning models on the internet.

    And that's how I started coding!

  22. 1

    My journey into coding began when I was around 13-14 years old, diving into HTML/CSS through online resources. Soon after, I delved into Python and became fascinated by its capabilities. Instead of pursuing a CS degree, I opted for a business degree but never stopped coding. I continued to teach myself, leveraging online resources and personal projects.

  23. 1

    I recommend this course
    https://www.udemy.com/course/the-web-developer-bootcamp/
    You can buy it for 12$ later (Udemy's courses are always on sale)

  24. 1

    Thanks for this thread, I don't code but I'm realizing that I could really further my capabilities if I could

  25. 1

    I went to college for computer science and learned to code there. However, it didn't teach me how to build products which is an entirely different story. I learned that by watching lots of Udemy tutorials, especially learning React and Node as well as Flutter for mobile.

    1. 1

      actually, I started from Udemy too... I'm grateful for the lessons I learned.

  26. 1

    When I was in the finance world I got interested in data science and learned that stuff first, it was mostly pandas in Python. That evolved to learning what else I could do in Python, which led me to Django, which led me to building full stack with APIs on backend to react on the frontend, which led me to infrastructure, and AWS and GCP to pretty much being able to do anything now!

    YouTube mostly, found a few people who build sample apps and followed that, eventually I had my own little repos I could re use.

  27. 1

    I studies physics in uni and got to write some janky simulation software that way. I was jealous of the nice internships that the CS students were getting (physics internships are academical, pay like shit, and are highly competitive), so I convinced an audio device company to take a chance on me because I could do Fourier transforms and none of the CS kids could.

    After that I kind of got more into it, ended up getting into functional programming, and just over time became really good at it.

  28. 1

    Personally, youtube videos and paid courses have helped me

  29. 1

    Studied it in college and self tought on line

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