I’m always interested in hearing other’s stories and what they’re working on. Anyone care to share?
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 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.
I posted my full story elsewhere, but my origin as a coder also starts with a game before I realized that coding was more interesting. In my case it was C&C: Red Alert, which was the first video game I got for Christmas.
I did the neopets thing too! I remember having to ask the local library to acquire books that taught HTML and CSS so I could learn it!
Sometimes I think about my Neopets being starved. A few years back I took the time to recover my ancient email and my Neopet account. After a few hours of labor I finally go to log in and I’m banned!
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.
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.
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!
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. I do some personal web stuff and embedded IoT for smart home bits & bobs.
I clearly lost a bet about 10 years ago that we’d have autonomous cars everywhere by now.
As an insider of DevOps. It’s not really that magical for most firms or that new it’s mostly marketing fluff made to sell more capable admins.
What’s your cynical take on autonomous vehicles?
It’s a really really hard problem and while lots of really really smart people are trying really really hard to make them happen, it’s still going to take a really really long time and people are going to be really really resistant to the idea while Tesla keeps making the technology look really really bad, which is already starting to result in the government get really really suspicious and pass some really really stupid laws that will really really hurt progress.
Even once we’ve got real robot cars on the road, it’s going to be a niche novel technology for a good while since people are too stupid to realize that we’re far worse drivers. There may be an iPhone moment by some current or new player in the field, making the service sexy and attractive and even fashionable islf not merely desirable; the current prevalence of services like Uber will help with this cultural shift, but it’s way too early to tell exactly what this will look like.
Autonomous vehicles in some shape or form are an inevitability, but it might just end up boring, hamstrung, or relegated to basic operations like forklifts or shuttles.
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.
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
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.
How much, would you say, are the things you work on specific to games? Just trying to get a feeling for how difficult it would be to move from “general” backend engineering to backend engineering for games.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
