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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Currently between personal projects while I write platform code for autonomous vehicles.

Current title is “data architect”, but titles are meaningless. I sorta do whatever needs doing. Usually that means working with large databases and fixing performance issues. Right now I’m mostly focused on a distributed postgres database cluster using Citus (~5TB of data). Working with the data is fun, dealing with so many ingestion pipelines is annoying though.

Got my start in Jr High doing a bunch of web dev. Took a class called “computer math” in high school which was really just C and C++ programming (little bit of java). Did a comp sci degree in college. Pretty standard route I guess. Early in my career I discovered that I understand data better than most people for some reason (yay autism I guess). So I get focused on database problems and teaching people how to make data models that are usable and query-able and index-able.

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 a professional C++ developer. I started with a Visual Basic intro to programming class my freshman year of high school, took a few more of those, then went to college for computer engineering.

Now I work on embedded boiler controls.

I learned my first language around 10-11, which was Lua (or at least Roblox’s flavor of it), because I stumbled into a “script builder” server one day that intrigued me.

People would post really long, confusing chat messages (which I would later learn were Lua scripts), then something would pop into the world in game, on their character, etc.

Turns out, the “script builder” server was running the chat as a constant compiler, executing chat messages against the server, then populating the game with the results. That left little old me in awe, and the people on there were super friendly and helped me learn the language.

One thing led to another, I went to college for CS, dropped out after a couple years and started freelancing. (Wrong choice folks, it was the hard road, I made pennies for my efforts trying to build a portfolio)

Eventually I got hired at my first salaried job, a Django agency as a full stack dev. Got to do some cool work. Hopped around in the agency world (some technical, some marketing), got tired of interacting with clients and doing any frontend work. Now I work on an energy demand/response product, am exclusively backend (and cloud-native), and fucking love my job.

So yeah, it started as a hobby, grew into a passion, and now I do what I love and get paid quite well for it. I also really enjoy building smart home devices.

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.

I’m a professional developer but I started out as a hobbyist. I fell in love with programming after seeing all the neat things you could do with jailbroken iPhone back in the day, and while I don’t dabble in that area, I love having the ability to customize or alter something to suit my needs.

My current work is pretty boring and repetitive, so I’ve found some energy to write a workout routine newsletter, like their weren’t already enough workout apps haha.

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!

Professional on a haitus here. Fully self taught, done a ton of hobby projects, most of my fleshed out ones being in either C89 or C99. Most recently has been a calculator application for myself in X11 too brush off the rust on my X11 knowledge, as well as a Lemmy client library for C.

Been keenly working on my own indie games, focusing primarily around Unity. It’s been great to leverage my skills and make something fun to play.

I released a low poly city builder a few years back and I’m always looking at ways to polish it up.

I’ve worked on a range of websites, apps and extensions but creating a game from scratch has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

I’m a software engineer, but I’m still pretty early in my career and have done mostly QA. I’m currently being integrated into a new team where I’ll actually get to develop on a C# and Angular project! I’ve done a little dev work on a much smaller Angular project so I’m really excited.