Conan the Barbarian and Below the Root on our Apple IIe. Tiny worlds behind the glowing Orange CRT. How do I make something like this? My mum (lol) helped me figure out how to get keyboard input in BASIC. I made a little game where an O character chases your X character around the screen. Core game loop. Browsing pirate CGA games at the warung in Pondok Indah, well outside the jurisdiction of US law. Glorious rack upon rack of tiny worlds to explore. Death Track and Prince of Persia. More BASIC and that gorilla throwing bananas. Later on the Multiline BBS. Talking late into the night with tech weirdos twice my age. All manner of mind bending ideas. Newsgroups. Punks and skaters and cypherpunks. Predicting what was coming, seeing the future we expected unfolding. Downloading Commander Keen over FTP. WinSock and Netscape. My first homepage. Downloading Linux and getting it running. Configuring XFree86 modelines all night lol. Turbo Pascal and VAX VMS at uni. My first job coding. Hacking out web backends in gnarly ass Perl. No databases just blatting and slurping comma delimited text files lol. Getting paid to do the most exciting thing there was to do, all day. Magic.
I started on a Ti-83 and better yet could take other programs online and load them and then modify to my desire.
When the teacher said show your work I wrote out the program I made to calculate the equation. They banned calculators altogether.
Once there was a computer I traded sleep to stay on it. I worked professionally for almost 3 decades and it ultimately cost me my health and mental health. It was often my own insecurities and anxiety that led me up the ladder.
I left the field and went to work for something I believe in and my tech skills are like wizardry to these folks.
There is a lot of blue sky to explore for people in tech.
I started programming on my schools CASIO Graphics Calculator.
It was slow but allowed some text based games we then shared. No internet so did it all from trial and error.
Then ... i wanted a 3D Cube rotating. At 15/16 this was a bit too much i guess i had no idea about rotation matrices back then and deemed myself a bit dense.
Never got around doing 3D stuff at work, only databases all the time. I dabbled some with ThreeJS but i guess i was still haunted.
BUT THEN. Geometric algebra! So smooth. If you like tables and had problems with stuff like cross products or quaternions, didnt like copy pasting rotation matrices, etc. YOU WILL LOVE geometric algebra! It's like you meet 2 tables on a FK and bam its a volume (highly simplified!!)
Just my 2 cents. Don't write yourself off if you did not do 1337 demos in primary school on a tamagotchi.
For me, it was the creative, puzzle-solving, game-like nature of it. Then I got my first job, and I had 100% autonomy, so a friend of mine and I got to solve real problems for real people in the real world. It was a rush. Making people’s lives better through software is still the biggest motivation for me.
Beautifully written! Thanks for sharing. I share a lot the emotional journey you described in my youth and also why I chose to be a programmer. The world felt so small during that time and something you could wrap your arms around and the community was your family. I don't know how the pre-teens of today percieve computing and technology, but I'd venture it's very different. Hope, though, that they feel the same rush with opportunities with AI that we felt with computing and the nascent connectivity of our times.
I don't consider myself a programmer, I started programming in my late 30s after I got my first office job. I learned it to automate all the bullshit I needed to do.
Wish now I'd started earlier. It's like having a special power if your actual job isn't programming. I like getting the computer to do my job for me.
I remember my first job out of uni, I had to convert what I thought was 2000 files from an old php site to gatsby. Mainly taking the page dump data and turning them into Yaml pages for static generation. It took me DAYS.
Last day, I realize it wasn't 2000. It was 8000, and there was not a snowballs chance in hell I could do the remaining 6000 in time for the deadline. So I went online, found pieces on stack overflow for this disgusting nodejs script that was 8 for loops deep, and then ran it against all the files. It took like.... a second, and all the files were just done. Poof, instant.
I got a job as a programmer and never looked back. The last ~decade has been a wild ride of highs and lows, but I still love doing it every day. There's just something deeply satisfying of taking an idea, and the computer just doing it.
My first program was in 2nd grade on an Apple IIe in basic. It was a program to check if a word was worth a dollar (a=1, b=2, c=3...)
It became a family activity (every one taking turns at the computer) every night to just type in words and see what they came out to. It was all very boring.
I was sure I was going to win.
I lost (well 2nd place), to the kid with 6 older brothers, who had that many years of building out the family list.
Reading this, I thought back to what made me want to become a programmer, and for me it was games too. Why did it look so cool when I was young? I don’t remember well what game it was. I wasn’t the Doom generation, and it wasn’t Pokémon either. I think it was a game called Hegemonia-region of iron. It was a cool spaceship game set in space.
Best case, we are sitting in a tree, sawing off the very branch we're sitting on. Like we're having fun at a bar, never knowing when this particular one will close. While watching our friends, family, and everyone else out there lose their jobs, mentally we're all ready for that Friday 9 am "three person 1:1"
Technically he didn't claim to be _employed_ as a programmer. I'll always be a programmer. But of course my job will be gone soon. Not sure what I'll do after that.. I'm too old for a new career.
Hang in there as best you can. Contrary to what AI bros on HN claim, LLMs can't actually program worth a damn. In time the deficiency will become too great to ignore, and companies will be replacing their models with humans. No telling how long that will take, but this is going to get walked back just like outsourcing to cheap Indian firms got walked back in the first decade of the century.
When the teacher said show your work I wrote out the program I made to calculate the equation. They banned calculators altogether.
Once there was a computer I traded sleep to stay on it. I worked professionally for almost 3 decades and it ultimately cost me my health and mental health. It was often my own insecurities and anxiety that led me up the ladder.
I left the field and went to work for something I believe in and my tech skills are like wizardry to these folks.
There is a lot of blue sky to explore for people in tech.
It was slow but allowed some text based games we then shared. No internet so did it all from trial and error.
Then ... i wanted a 3D Cube rotating. At 15/16 this was a bit too much i guess i had no idea about rotation matrices back then and deemed myself a bit dense.
Never got around doing 3D stuff at work, only databases all the time. I dabbled some with ThreeJS but i guess i was still haunted.
BUT THEN. Geometric algebra! So smooth. If you like tables and had problems with stuff like cross products or quaternions, didnt like copy pasting rotation matrices, etc. YOU WILL LOVE geometric algebra! It's like you meet 2 tables on a FK and bam its a volume (highly simplified!!)
Just my 2 cents. Don't write yourself off if you did not do 1337 demos in primary school on a tamagotchi.
Wish now I'd started earlier. It's like having a special power if your actual job isn't programming. I like getting the computer to do my job for me.
It was an ACE cracktro for International Karate that was putting huge things in the borders, something about it stuck to my mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ODIb5r_fS8
Last day, I realize it wasn't 2000. It was 8000, and there was not a snowballs chance in hell I could do the remaining 6000 in time for the deadline. So I went online, found pieces on stack overflow for this disgusting nodejs script that was 8 for loops deep, and then ran it against all the files. It took like.... a second, and all the files were just done. Poof, instant.
I got a job as a programmer and never looked back. The last ~decade has been a wild ride of highs and lows, but I still love doing it every day. There's just something deeply satisfying of taking an idea, and the computer just doing it.
My first program was in 2nd grade on an Apple IIe in basic. It was a program to check if a word was worth a dollar (a=1, b=2, c=3...)
It became a family activity (every one taking turns at the computer) every night to just type in words and see what they came out to. It was all very boring.
I was sure I was going to win.
I lost (well 2nd place), to the kid with 6 older brothers, who had that many years of building out the family list.
Best case, we are sitting in a tree, sawing off the very branch we're sitting on. Like we're having fun at a bar, never knowing when this particular one will close. While watching our friends, family, and everyone else out there lose their jobs, mentally we're all ready for that Friday 9 am "three person 1:1"