How did you become a decent programmer? Your life's story.

I love these threads...

I was your archetypal fatboy nerd, that started programming when I was 9 on my Arati ST in 1989 with STOS basic I had great fun editing the break out clone called Orbit, and finding game code in basic books and magazines to stitch together to make new games, One was greatly inspired by elite but in 2D So you would have to design your ship, buy things or power ups, take off and landing was a luna lander clone, and traveling to a planet gave you a map where you watched your progress but you could have a random encounter with either an asteroid field that you then needed to dodge all the oncoming asteroids or space pirates to fight then you got to your destination to sell your stuff.

And I have enjoyed programming ever since, moving on to a PC when I was 13/14, I remember I went though a phase of writing lots of letters to games development companies like Blizzard (The fist Warcraft game's copy protection was out of sync with the manual) and David Barben in particular telling him how much I liked Elite and he could improve Elite 2 when I was like 13 (I also wrote an Elite 3 save game editor in Pascal after having hacked around with it using a hex editor)

Then I got into the modding scene with Doom II and then Quake, Got crappy grades at school BB,CC,DD (I was quite badly dyslexic back in school) but managed to get onto a (UK) collage course, Advanced Computing at where we learnt VB6 and other general computery stuff then went to University to do Computer Science where we learnt Linux and Java.

Now at this point I was still very much into modding games like Half-Life (somehow in-between Everquest and Ultima Online) and I had always wanted to be a games developer since I first had my Atari, but didn't know how to get into the industry so after Uni I took a job writing business software for a fashion company called Mulberry and ended up writing a warehouse pick-pack-dispatch system for there online and mail order department which was quite a small area of the businesses at the time you even had to click an email link on the web page to order from it and it was doing around £100k per year so they just left me to it, at the point I left the company, the website and every system behind it had been re-written by me the company's only programmer in C# and it was now taking £4 Million a year.

I left to join the company I am still with now and I am a technical team lead for 6 people writing web-based SaaS software for HR, workforce management, document scanning and mobile data collection.

And so I still use tools like Unity to fulfill my need to create games (a dream I have had since 9), normally only parts of games that interest me like MMO server architecture with netcode, procedurally generated galaxy's with solar systems and planets you can explore and dynamic forrests that change the landscape as they grow over it and can be chopped back, neat stuff like that. But recently I have set myself the challenge of actually finishing a full mobile game, though actually I am just procrastinating by writing this here

 

Wow, it's a journey for most of us. Here goes.

Got out of the US Air Force (Avionics Technician) after spending my last 3 1/2 wonderful years of my service in Athens Greece. Best time of my entire life. My girlfriend was a bartender in Glyfada. :mrgreen: The Drachma to US dollar exchange rate was insane. (prior to euro of course) I lived like a well to do playboy visiting the Greek Islands etc. /cry I miss it. Youth.

I digress, when I got back to the States several large Airlines had folded and went out of business, Eastern Airlines etc...so this made using my Avionics skills a very competitive job search. I never found an airline job after years of searching. I took odd jobs.

While temporarily living at home with Mom and Dad, my Dad bought a 386 computer. I used it alot and then Doom was released. I was hooked on a gaming life. Like so many of us, I loved the game and started my long journey of a PC centric life. I fixed everyone's PC's I knew. Learned DOS commands and could troubleshoot most DOS 5 6 issues easy as breathing, then Windows 3.1 and I kept up my troubleshooting I learned in the Air force, but just applied it to the PC realm. During this time I always would say "one day I'm gonna make a game."

Then Borland C was released. BOOM! I quickly learned how to write sprites to the screen and exchange data to and from the hard drive and memory. I Had the wonderful "Learning Opportunities" while learning C and Assembly. In Assembly I remember the video addresses, Hard Drive, and memory had specific Hex interrupts you could call. Well I got one wrong, compiled a program with the Hard drive Hex address instead of memory, and wiped my boot sector. In assembly everyone has done it...At least once. My crowning achievement during the 3DFX days was a demo i made of a Mortal Kombat like 2D animation of myself wearing a karate robe. I could control my character on screen moving left and right, jumping, punching and kicking. I was so excited to make just that.

I dabbled for years with C, and C++ then Visual C++ came out and Borland largely went defunct. I HATED visual C++ with a passion that I stopped programming. I remember looking at their documentation and I was saying I have to learn 99% of this Bull#$%^ to get to the 1% i actually need.

I then jumped into other hobbies. But kept an eye out for engines where I could make my ever shifting vision of a software 3D creation.
I dabbled with Torque, Game Maker Studio, C4, Crystalspace, Ogre, Genesis3D. I played around with some Game Engine modding as well, but never really completed anything.

And then Unity came along for MAC only. I was one of those back then emailing UT and asking when was a Windows version coming out. Back then a Mac was just way out of my league price wise. When the PC version came out, I tried Unity and didn't look back.

Fast forward to now. Pro user with iOS Pro and I can complete what I choose to start. That's likely the biggest lesson I've learned thanks to the wisdom of the fellow board members here. To take on things I can complete in a reasonable time frame to prevent frustration.

Every month I try to keep learning. I made the most progress on Unity3D to date from Will Goldstone's website Unity books learning the Unity API. Once I "Got it" regarding the component model and exposed variables in the editor, everything fell into place "Click".

I'm now working on a bite sized Demo to get users reactions before I spend a year, or years developing something no one wants. Again taking the advice of board members here.

In closing I'd say focused persistence is the largest trait to have and talking to others while doing it to keep your sanity. Today many people mention the "Make a Game button" which is a myth. I've learned to be happy with accepting being able to make sometimes 2% - 5% progress on some days as long as I'm moving forward. I get great jumps in progress however when experience allows me to move very fast such as after a solid 2 weeks of setting up objects and Assets etc.. A tendency is to feel as if you hadn't moved forward. Then I drop it all in and feel tons better.

My to-do now is learning more about the Networking side of things... as it is a networked world.

 

My story may be a little different.

I'm 36 and just started learning C# last year through books and the internet, having no previous exposure at all to programming. I've always had a desire to learn all aspects of creating a game, and didn't want to be on my deathbed one day regretting that I never explored this avenue of creativity. I figured better late than never, and I'm lucky to have a very supporting wife.

Thankfully, with limited knowledge and experience and lots of online searches, I've been able to get done whatever I set out to solve through novice-level programming. I'm also very grateful to the Unity engine and all the asset store developers that help me express my ideas without having had to have years of experience!

Edit: Oops, just saw the thread title and noticed it was about becoming a "decent" programmer. Not there yet.

 

I went to college my junior/senior years of high school in 2000-02, took multiple visual C++, VB, COBOL (lol as/400), websphere for ecommerce, and bunch of other programming related classes. Then I got into real estate, bought, fixed and rented some crappy houses, got my real estate license and said screw programming. (I lived in rural ohio at the time and there weren't any jobs)

Through my 20's I had several construction related businesses ranging from drywall to dismantling 100+ year old barns to reclaim the amazing lumber. As a hobby I did web development, and when I was 26 I made a feature rich rpg game in plain javascript as a learning project which got me interested in coding again. I enrolled in school, thinking I wanted to get into networking and internet security. After taking a bunch of related courses and a couple Microsoft windows/server certifications, I realized I absolutely hate hardware, networking, and operating systems.

Along the way looking through my dreamspark account that gives students free software I downloaded XNA and spent a few months going through the example games and tweaking them to make my own I started to look at other engines. I tried UDK and Cry3 and eventually Unity which was like XNA on steroids, with an awesome editor, and I was sold. At the time I was still working construction in Seattle, which paid great money, but I was working on microsoft campus, watching all these tech people doing awesome stuff. I started buying and reading tons of programming books.

I stuck with it, after 2.5 years of using Unity I had enough prototypes/experience that I landed my first job as a unity developer. From there I've done some contracting at a couple companies here in Seattle incorporating the kinect into various unity projects. I started making good money and dropped out of school. Things have been going great since.

I had brain surgery a year ago and qualify for disability, I'm 30 now, and still manage to work as a Unity dev full time here in Seattle.

 

I have a fairly humble begining in the computer sciences at the young age of 8, back in the yester-year of 1996, after discovering QBASIC on my fathers office computer. This prompted me to work the summer months over the next two years mowing lawns to save up to purchase my first computer, a Pentium II 266MHz.

After spending time as the best programmer of the whole neighborhood, I was itching to delve a little deeper into this newly found hobby. I discovered FrontPage Express shortly there after tucked deep within the Program Files folder and began my foray into HTML and JavaScript.

Not long after, having spent less and less time every month with the computer and more times out socializing, I was introduced to Counter-Strike which rekindled my passion with programming and design after discovering the modding comunity. This then lead into purchasing a student copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 and writing various console applications from text adventures to basic Rougelike games.

After having spent time in a variety of graphic and game engines including Irrlicht, Ogre3D, and 3D Game Studio among many others; I have happily settled down with Unity for all of my graphic needs and VIM for everything done on the servers.

What seems like a few short years, here I am now. Working within a medical laboratory, attempting to create the next big indie hit on Steam or the iTunes AppStore, and taking freelance programming jobs on the side where time permits.

It has been a long trip, full of great learning experiences thus far, and I am eager to see where the future will take me and what adventures are ahead.

 

First did a bit on my dad's ZX81. Then we had some sort of Philips word processor which had BASIC on it and huge floppy disks.
Next we got a Spectrum for chrismas.
Then I got my own Amiga 600 with lemmings and pushover (sponsered by Quavers) on it. Again BASIC.
Then I got a PC and bought some Borland C++ software which was very hard to learn! Particularly as it came packaged with "Teach yourself C" books.
Windows programming is horrible compared with doing BASIC on an Amiga or Spectrum! And C++ and all it's null pointer problems is horrible too.
Then I got a job in a web company and learned HTML and SQL and Coldfusion and Actionscript.
Then I got a job in a games company using my C++, Python and actionscript. (Horrible company in Gateshead).
Then I got a job in a Flash company. Then a Flash Games company.
Now I'm working for myself making Unity games and doing my own 3D art.
Next if I don't make a lot of money doing this I'm going to quit programming and do something else.


When I was younger I remember looking at all the little bits of crappy software I made on my PC and thinking, I wish there was some sort of way that everyone could see these programs. If only I had invented the concept of an App Store! haha.