I knew I was meant to be a programmer when...

...can you answer that question?

I recently got into coding at the beginning of April. I am in an entirely different career right now (education), but I have always loved tinkering with computer systems and messing around with things. I’ve built several computer systems throughout my life and have been an avid video gamer since childhood. I have my earliest memory of a game called “Stunt Island”, which has a bit of coding elements to it.

Although I still know I’m a massive beginner, things are starting to really “click” for me and I can see how I can continue to research and learn more about programming, Unity, and C% I am in my late thirties, and I keep reading about how it is never too late to start.

So I’m very curious to hear about the moment when any of you knew that programming was something you wanted to do the rest of your life.

Cheers!

 

High school.

I was going through that phase where I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and nothing I've done so far really appealed to me as something I'd be willing to spend the next 50 years doing.

Took an elective intro to Java course one year and it just clicked - I liked writing software, even when all I was doing was

System.out.println("Hello World!");

.
Something about making an application and seeing it work just sends those good brain chemicals rushing.

I continued down this path in college and graduated recently after completing a 3-year program. Now I'm working for a company as a web/mobile app developer and am experimenting around with Unity on the side.

No regrets.

 

My first computer encounter was somewhere between the ages of 6 and 8 at my dad's workplace. I don't recall anything about the computer itself other than it was fulfilling the role of a library index. In order to keep me occupied one of the engineers introduced us to the concept of text adventure games. Namely Zork.

I remember being impressed with the game but at some point in the middle of playing it the game abruptly ended for some reason (I believe I might have exited the game but it's just as likely the computer had a problem) and I was left with just the command prompt.

Since I had no experience with computers at the time I remember being very frustrated that I wasn't able to start the application back up and deciding that I had to learn how to make them work so that I would never be frustrated and unable to do anything again.

Eventually we gained access to a computer but it wasn't anything like my first exposure. The Commodore 64 was a very fascinating machine because the shell that you accessed your files and applications through was an actual programming language meaning you naturally picked up programming while you learned to use the computer.

A couple of years later we obtained a used IBM PC XT which had the command prompt I had encountered years ago in the form of DOS 3.33 which started me down the path of learning Microsoft BASIC. A year later we obtained a used ZEOS 386 which ran DOS 6.22 and encountered QuickBASIC.

QuickBASIC was a fantastic language. BASIC had always been called a beginner's language but this thing took the concept and ran wild with it. It came as an IDE (in fact it powered the text editor for DOS) with an intelligent context-sensitive help system that almost always seemed to know what you wanted to know.

Thanks to QuickBASIC I made the decision at the age of 12 to become a programmer. My first real project was to build a text adventure game engine from scratch using QuickBASIC. I never truly finished it though because at the time I was a perfectionist and constantly trying to evolve it to the next level.

Languages don't last forever though and I finally reached the point that I had no more use for QuickBASIC and started learning C++ in 2001. Once I finally understood the basics I picked up SDL, picked up Lua, and started building a game engine.

My game engine was never completed though thanks to encountering Unity. I already knew C# thanks to spending a week with it back when it first emerged. Between that, knowing that I was reinventing the wheel with my own engine, and loving the user friendliness of Unity I decided to just use Unity.

A few years ago I was invited to join a group that wanted to make a game but didn't have funding or a publisher. After a period of time ranging somewhere between a few months and a year we gained funding and I got my first paid contract.

TL;DR - My moment of decision came about thanks to being slowly sucked into a world of wonderment and by the time I realized it I was already enjoying it too much to stop.

 

When I played around with Applesoft BASIC and the computer did what I told it to do. (Version of BASIC integrated into Apple II computers)

Eventually I moved on to QBasic, then QuickBasic (basically QBasic which came with MS-DOS, but you could actually compile to binaries). Then I got Borland C++ 3.0 and was creating multiplayer BBS door program games. This was all while I was a kid.

I was fascinated with FPS games at the time, and decided to create a BBS door program FPS. Apparently I was better at coding than math though. So I spent a good amount of effort creating a very basic raycasting 3D "engine" which displayed as ANSI graphics. I got it to the point you could walk around rooms. It technically worked over a terminal, but as I tested it it turned out that modems of the time couldn't actually send new frames as fast as I had estimated. Getting a playable frame rate turned out to be impossible. Oops!

But that never stopped me. I still consider it a success in a way.