Why did you start coding?

I was 13 years old when I started coding. The specific reason was a friend/mentor of mine wanted a website and didn't have the money required at the time to set one up, think options available in 2001. This was the 2nd iteration as the 1st used frames and web archives only archived the nav bar. (https://web.archive.org/web/20020726135607/http://www.fireballsite.com/). I started initially using FrontPage, but it didn't do everything I wanted, so I started learning HTML, then JS, then C/C++, and Java. I was always intrigued to learn more about how computers worked and delighted when my code actually did something useful.

I started coding last year at 28 because I want to create apps and website myself, I really want to be a professional in this field.

I'm 31 and work in frontend. Started game scripting and making custom levels in Starcraft, Warcraft, Freespace and a few other games. Started coding only in college. Wanted to be a game dev & specialized in graphics and image processing (C & C++).

Found out that game dev is really hard and people work to the bone, so I opted for something different that is lucrative and still visual. I've become really interested in UI/UX along the way.

Originally because I wanted to do GIS, but then it evolved

22 :)

I wanted to bring my design to life 😄 sophomore (2nd) year, college.

echo Hi

rest was history

I started coding to create video games with my brothers!

Now I code to create value for others.

One day I hope to build something with my brothers.

We'll see.

1. One time I was hanging around coders who were looking intently into a bunch of color-coded scripts and pecking at their keyboards. Some were hitting fast (C coders) some were slow and sleepy (Python coders). I was intrigued.
2. I've always liked to know what's going on under the hood.
3. Finally, like it or not, coding is a literacy.

Im 22 now and I started around age 15 tbh, the thing that interesting to me the most is the creation of something new, I feel that with coding I can create almost everything .

I was in high school with a general love for computers so picked up a Software Development course in college for 2 years where I had my first experience of programming (17 years old). Then went on to studying BSc (Hons) Computing in uni for 4 years (including placement as a software developer) and been in dev roles since graduating in 2015. Absolutely LOVE it and have known since college I wouldn't do anything else. There is just SO MUCH you can do.

Ohhh, that's a good question!

My main reason to start coding is that I always wanted to build my SAAS application. At age 18 I knew - I will be startup guy or something. But I was so scared to start coding, so I spent almost 7 years of my life to find the way to get some monies to hire a developer and build something. How stupid that is, huh? Not to mention cringy attempts to find someone to work for free... Meeeh

Interestingly though that I started to code in 2018 when I was ~24 y.o. but never released something since then, despite I working almost every day on something. It just took so long to develop something alone, so the trends are changing, techologies changing too. My ideas and stack gets irrelevant faster than I make something.

In other hand, I made very cool career because of that. I found my first job only 3 months after I started to learn code and I grew really fast because I spent ALL of my time to learn and atempts to make some project.

It makes me wondering all the time: if I put my career down in order to spend all of my time to developing my projects, would've I released anything yet? Because it's really hard to combine these two. I put down almost all my social life due to that.

I started coding when I was 9 years old because I wanted to make video games. I never did publish a full game, but I really loved building things and the instant gratification making a working piece of software. To this day, I love it when a piece of code finally does what it is supposed to do.

I started coding last year because I had a great idea for an app and from there it really seems like the best move forward considering my background in marketing and content creation. Inspired by Naval Ravikant I want to be able to build and sell!

Understanding the basics of programming was part of my bachelor's studies.

At the beginning it was hard and it took some time to grow one me. Today, and after my master's in software engineering, I still love this profession and I'm happy to make a living with it.

Wanted to be part of the "Cool Kids" 🤓

I was 12 years old back then in 1997. I felt so passionate about making websites, IRC scripts, and coding eggdrops/psybncs.
I evolved later with automation, paused for a career in international logistics, then self-learning automation and systems that solve problems. Been also into Marketing for a while.

I took my first CS class because it was a requirement to graduate college. I thought I wouldn't like it, and I didn't at first actually. Then I did a bunch of script writing during my graduate program, and I liked that a lot. That led me to writing SQL code for three years in my first job out of college. I don't do much programming anymore, but I did a fun little thing in Apps Script to create a program to help businesses construct case studies. Sometimes I think about going back to a career doing some kind of programming, but at least for now I'm staying the course.

Have since I was a kid, my switch from graphic design to web was pretty natural since I designed print materials and maintained Wordpress websites at my first job, was great to be exposed to a little bit of everything.

I mainly started because I was interested in business and currently hated my degree.

i love coding since childhood , i was curious to know about app and website works

its my brothers initiative that i started coding. he is a computer engineer now working at dyson. i started it in 2019 when i was 17 year old with C++ but the basic purpose is good problem solving skills so i started working and i'm in forth semester of cs and have made a project in every semester. project include tic tac toe , chess ,electricity bill management and payment system(using python). more under working.
hope to make more to expand my portfolio

Money.

Technically started around 11, when I got an HTML tutorial from my parents, and dove into some very basic CSS. Let that go and eventually got back into it (Lua, some Java) just to be able to mod games and mess around as a teenager. Did 4 years of C++ in high school soon after.

I stuck with it ever since because I realized it's one of the few ways to build something meaningful for yourself without permission or external help. Now pretty experienced with Python, Java, some Scala and JS. Long story short, it's my career today. I can't imagine not coding and count myself pretty lucky for discovering it so early. Thanks, parents!

I just wanted to see what can be done.

Was around 12 when I typed hex code from magazines back then and saved them on floppy disks (luckily I had not to use datasettes anymore! :D ) and hoped for the best it will work. Most of the time it did not, as there had been one line with two ore more errors which somehow gave the correct CRC anyway!

Then some Commodore Basic with a lot of ugly GOTOs!

Finally I learned some Turbo C with around 14 just 1 or 2 years before we learned it in school. Older mates did cool stuff with it, I wanted to be able to do this as well.

Then Later Perl, C++, Java, some bits of C#, Scala, JavaScript, Python, ... The journey is ongoing :)

More than 30 years of tinkering with code obviously! :D

Long story, but in short: At the age of 21, I decided to start an ecommerce shop. Shopify wasn't really a thing back then, so I went to the book store and bought a book about PHP and MySQL (which was basically a big tutorial). I've had done one course on programming before, which was called "C++ for financial engineers" and was a prerequisite for a financial engineering degree at Berkeley (I ended up not applying to Berkeley after all).

I started when I was 19 because it seemed like using a new part of my brain. I ended up dropping it and becoming a designer instead. I picked it back up when I was 24 because our app had too big of a backlog for one person to handle :D.

I started when I was 11 years old - I wanted to create a browsergame (Not a flash one) and I was quite a fan of those browsergames at that time. Started with HTML, CSS, PHP - I've only added JS later on. Fun times!

It really started when I was 11 years old and found a HTML tutorial for Adobe Dreamweaver on YouTube at half past two in the morning and was so excited about it that I immediately started to work through this tutorial. It was so interesting for me that I had spent the whole night with it until the sun came up again.

In general, I have always been interested in automated and complex systems that make sense out of collected data.

This is also the reason why I am still a big fan of flying. Besides the "wonder" of flying itself, all interesting topics are really united there. Software, mechanics, hydraulics, radio, physics, etc.

Loved mathematics and coding is essentially applied mathematics. Afterwards came the pleasure of creating and the many possibilities.

I was 18 and I wanted to build some fun stuff, like an Instagram bot 😅

When I was 9 or 10 (~2001) I wanted to make a website for my Counter-Strike team so I learned HTML, PHP and databases. It was fun, so I kept going :)

"Because it is there".

Smarminess aside, and I will age myself here, I saw a calculator work when I was a 'yute' in the '70s, and was amazed that it got the answer instantaneously.

Then, my school at the time got a computer, and I said to myself, 'holy number crunching, batman', you mean I can make this 'calculator' do more, like anything I want it to do?

My STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) universe went from black and white to color when I wrote my first BASIC program.

That was the why. To answer your other questions, I was probably 15 at the time. Are the reasons still the same? Yes and no. No, because I was enthralled by technology that was as-yet unavailable to the average person. Now computers are ubiquitous. Yes, in that programming is a tool, like a paintbrush, except the palette and canvas keep growing.

Loquacity notwithstanding, 'to make something worthwhile' and to 'make a few bucks in the process' remains the same.

Always had a passion for tech and computers. I started coding when I was 14, in school. I enjoyed it but it was not too fun, mainly solving maths problems with Pascal.
Then, I went to study Chemistry at university. I re-started coding to check that the equations and models shown in class were correct. I ended up writing a paper about Boltzmann distribution with my professor and other students.
Then, I did a PhD in computational chemistry and eventually became a data engineer.
Today the reasons are very different, there's not a lot of science involved in writing big data pipelines, but I still enjoy it.

I was 18 and I started because I wanted to build whatever came to my mind. Now I run a community for other indie makers that have a similar mindset :)