How did you learn programming?

With a lot of patience! Even now, when I try some new programming language, I need to learn the new structures and syntax. It's frustrating, because you are used to code away what you want without much thought. BUT when I prep myself to be patient and enjoy the process instead of aiming at the outcome, it works.

That's about the mindset. Now tools: Think about a small project you want to make, something very small. Then pick a language, use a popular language, widely used. Like PHP, ReactJS, Java, etc. And start building the thing. Google everything you need to know, copy and adapt it.

Family got a DSL subscription in 2005. I started wandering forums and ended up at some post with the title "create your own forum for free" or something in that tone. It was an article about setting up SMF (Simple Machines Forum) to a free shared hosting. Apparently it was a rabbit hole and I'm still falling deeper and deeper. :D

I wanted to learn Python, so I started looking videos on youtube, a channel named CodingForEntrepreneurs helped me a lot to built a simple web app with python using Django.

After that I jumped right away to build a project I wanted to make at that time. I honestly think that the best way to learn something is by doing. I find a lot of people with great talent and they always end up taking courses, and courses and courses but never actually end up building something. You talk with them and you think like they are 10x developers but in fact, they are filled with theory.

The best way to learn something is by doing it. Have an idea of a product even though is not profitable and start building it. It's like riding a bike, to learn how to ride a bike you first need to use it. Nobody studies "how to ride a bike". Yes, you'll have a lot of errors, yes it's not going to be optimized at first, yes it's going to be the crappiest code you'll ever write but on the long run if you keep coding and researching you'll be a great developer.

I started in 1982 with an Apple II and afterschool training. From there I wrote code in notebooks and coded it after getting home. Afterward, I took some classes in High School and College. As an adult, I use books for learning big and websites for the quick lookup.

There was no real challenge for me as I think in logic. However, there is always something new to learn.

Learning to problem-solve is an essential skill to learn as a programmer. I just wrote a short eBook on problem-solving you may find useful: https://problemsolvingforprogrammers.com/

Instead of hacks and tricks, you’ll find 7 approaches you can apply to the problems you solve. You’ll become a better problem solver. You’ll also strengthen core programming skills: reading and reviewing code, writing code, and thinking in new and creative ways.

Started to learn programming a few of years into my career while in a small business that needed some random things done. Started with SQL, then moved onto python because I wanted to integrate some external APIs. Fast forward 4 years on, I get paid $400/day to as a freelance coder. Any savings I make go into business ideas. Life is good!

I use the SoloLearn App(it’s free) to at least know some terms then I try to build something and google like mad.

I can say the best way for me to learn is to by building something which includes complex things that I on top of my head do not know how to do, it forces me to research and come up with a solution. As for how I did, through codecademy, was interested in programming since i wanted to know how games were made though did not want to become a game dev initially.

• Self-taught QBasic from age 7 to 13. I think there was a QBasic manual that came with Windows? In 8th grade, I wrote a chatbot and entered it into the school science fair under the title "Artificial Intelligence." It was not, but won 2nd place in the California State Science Fair nonetheless. Then I stopped coding in high school.
• Started college intending to be a CS major. Learned a bit of C, C++ in school. Learned some HTML, Perl and SQL in a summer internship. Hated the CS curriculum and switched to Econ sophomore year. I really should have been a coder as a career, but my college experience was so bad, I went on a 14-year detour.
• After graduating, I worked in finance for 14 years. Did a lot of complex financial modeling in Excel, which is kinda like coding.
• At age 35, I quit finance to become an Indiehacker. Self-taught ever since through a combination of books, YouTube videos, web articles, Stackoverflow, documentation etc. Started with HTML, CSS, jQuery and Drupal. Moved from Drupal to Wordpress. Dabbled in Python and Ruby. Tried out Ruby on Rails and Django but it didn't stick. Eventually found React and loved it. Now working with React + Bootstrap/Scss + Firebase.

Disclaimer: I am 26 years old with a strong passion for programming since a young age. This is more about my journey than only programming.

I had no computer at home, but there was something about computers that I always felt a drive towards.

My first contact with programming that I remember was when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade and there was a computer course at school where I learned some shell commands to create a guess-the-number game. I also remember finding a book about working in MS Word, I had no idea what it meant but I liked looking at the images of their UI in the book.

I always loved creating stuff, I created some games in GameMaker, added fancy JavaScript code to my Piczo profile (if anyone used it, it was like a personal page where you could post photos/content, it was then overhyped by hi5), all this before I started actually learning programming.

I started learning "real" programming while in high-school, in 2008 at 14 years old as I joined a math-informatics specialized class. I also decided to participate in the regional Informatics Olympiad. This meant that I also had to prepare for it. I solved several algorithmic problems per week (in C or C++). I also participated in non-algorithmic contents such as a game-development competitions, code-golf competitions and, most relevant the present day, web development competitions.

After high-school I applied to MIT, but (not surprisingly), I didn't get in. I decided to go to the local university in my home-town (Craiova, Romania) on a computer-science degree. This meant I had more time for personal projects. During university I also joined programming competitions, created websites for various local businesses and tried creating several web projects/platforms. Although most of the platform ideas were nice and the implementation was good, none of them took off as I lacked the skills and time to market and maintain them. Apart from one: userTrack. I somehow got the idea to create a heatmap & session-recording tool for websites and started implementing it on 30th of December 2012. That’s right, on New Year’s Eve 🎉 and 1st of January 2013 I was programming. I have Mercurial versioning to prove it:

I posted userTrack on the CodeCanyon marketplace and over the years I always maintained it and kept improving it, as clients would keep on buying it without any marketing from my part and their good reviews and feature requests kept me motivated to keep working on it. Until today, in 7 years, it sold for about $65k, which is around $8k/year.

When I finished university I already knew programming and software engineering pretty well as I could create any application I could imagine.

Some quick after-university (2016-2020) facts:

• I was contacted by a Google recruiter and went through 14 interviews at Google (2 x phone interviews, 2 x 5 on-site interviews, 2 x extra phone interviews), but for both applications I got rejected in the very final stages of the process with no clear explanation why. :(
• I created my own LLC so I could focus more on userTrack and pay taxes as I should.
• In August 2017 I joined a really cool, small indie gaming company in Amsterdam and worked on https://curvefever.pro . Even though we did make a really cool game, we couldn’t monetize it well enough so the company went bankrupt in October 2019.
• Since then I started working full-time on userTrack and released a number of big updates, while now I’m switching focus towards marketing.

I don’t recall the exact moment I “learned” programming. I always loved building stuff. If I didn’t know how to make something, I would just try random stuff until it worked or searched for solutions, but I always persevered until I created what I imagined. Programming is just a tool.