What inspired you to pursue a career or hobby in programming?

Computer plays video games
I want to make video games
Learn to program
Never even make video games

I had enough common sense as an 18-year-old to know that writers and musicians need day jobs, but not enough to realize that I'd have been better off learning a unionized trade and becoming an electrician or a plumber. Since I didn't have the looks or the personality to make it as a rent boy in Manhattan, I rent out my brain instead of my ass as a programmer.

There's no inspiration or passion involved. I'm in it for the money. It's thankless work best outsourced, and I laugh at articles saying that AI is going to take my job. An AI smart enough to take my job would be too smart to want it.

programming cool

I was good at math and bad with people.

I was apparently enraptured by PCs as a child, didn't really do much apart from games / emulators until secondary school. At ~14 I was offered an extracurricular class to learn how to program TI-82 calculators. This really clicked for me, ended up pursuing a heavy math / comp sci / stem curriculum. I get to automate away tedious / boring tasks by working on a mentally stimulating puzzle. The rush on getting it working the first time is 👌

I don't suck as much at programming as I suck at everything else.

Definitely video games and wanting to make mods. Started off “making mods” in TorqueScript (I believe it was called?) when I was in middle school.

Wanted to make games as a kid, got way way waayy too into it, now I just make my own programs when I need to

Reading as a kid about virus analysis and how they work in a short column in a... newspaper. Yeah, they even listed full Windows Registry paths. Didn't know what HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE was, didn't own a computer, only knew about some DOS commands, but I knew I wanted to be able to do that job and decompile stuff (whatever that ment) and see how it worked. Just like dismantling (and ultimately destroying) toys to see the inner workings.

After finally owning a computer and being bored by the few games I had on Windows 95, being limited to Notepad, Internet Explorer (without an internet connection yet; or was it Netscape Navigator?) and Paint (in which I sucked, lacking any artistic talent), when I learned that I can just type stuff in Notepad, I borrowed a book about "programming" in HTML. Then Pascal, the pinnacle being a simple XOR encryption program, with a god damn white on blue "windows" interface with buttons (a la Midnight Commander). Writing TRIVIA "scripts" for mIRC channels made us gods. Then Delphi naturally followed, making my own tool to track how many hours I've spent on dialup a month (yes, internet was very expensive) while listening to 80's music on Winamp. Nothing was more interesting than that. Then got a job and out of a sudden started making my own money by writing Delphi code. Up until then I wasn't really aware that my passion would also bring food on the table. The rest is history.

Programming in those days felt unreal. Felt like The Matrix. I knew that what I want to do for the rest of my life is look at text on a screen, hit CTRL+F9, see a crash, set some breakpoints, and ponder around the room or while taking a piss about what went wrong and how to solve it. I'm no Einstein, but I understood why science people dedicate their lifes to their work and disregard completely their social life.

I always read a lot. 100+ books a year, plus magazines. Then I got a job in the boonies and got home only on weekends. All of a sudden I was reading a book a day. Even with the library and used book stores, that was financially ruinous for our young family. So I bought a VIC-20, a used b&w tv, and the programmer's reference manual to take out to the work camps.. The savings on books paid for the system in just a few months.

One thing led to another and a decade or so later I made the transition from hobby to career. Now I'm retired and looking to reboot as a hobbyist.

I don't know...I think I always had a passion for it. I always liked tech stuff and liked to play the computers. Built my first site at 13, after that another and another and so on...now I have 10 years of software engineering, worked with multiple technologies and frameworks along the way. Nowadays I work as a software architect at one of the largest companies in my country.

Making games, which, I've come to discover, is basically the Santa Claus of programming because most professional developers that I know started for the same reason and absolute do not program or develop games.

Was majoring in accounting and had to take a CS101 class programming in Pascal. Changed majors immediately, thinking "Where has this been all my life?" This predates PCs, although I did have a Commodore 64 to practice coding on BASIC after that.

December 8th, 2009 - Motorola Droid successfully rooted ... [granting] root access on the phone using a terminal emulator. This is how I learned bash which inevitably pushed me into pursuing proper Computer Science.

wiki ref

I always thought engineering is cool but time consuming. Programming was picked up along the way and now the money is too good to do anything else. Wish I could work on devices again.

I'm really fucking good at it and since I'm in a third world country software developers make 10x as much as the average person here (while still making 10x less than someone in the US)

I had a knack for computers. I wanted a degree that would keep me from being poor. I don't like programming but I do it for money.

I stupidly thought that since everyone uses computers and they are getting more popular, I could pursue my passion as a career. Still waiting on an entry level job.

Always been a bit of an introvert and loner. Got fascinated by computers and games and wanted to know how they worked in detail. Had good grades so got into a 5 year Computer Science and Engineering program, landed a job before I even graduated.

I used to make bots in RuneScape. If I’m being honest post high school I had to pick something and just said fuck it CS degree

After typing in a bunch of programs on my 1KB Sinclair ZX-81 I wanted to understand how they worked and wanted to make some of my own.

It was a natural progression for me, over the years I've gotten my fingers into a lot of pies across tech from running servers to REing to PCB design/Making and programming serves as a bit of glue to interconnect it all and then I fell in love with it.

But ONLY as a hobby, I know me and if I had to do it as a career day in and day out I'm not going to want to do it recreationally and the love and passion will eventually burn out. Although I do find areas to sprinkle it in in my career to make my job easier.

MISSINGNO.

I got into programming via, I kid you not, Second Life.

Wanted to animate some objects with the built-in scripting language. Turned out I was pretty good at it.

Fast forward 15 years and I'm having a decade-long career in software.

Back in the mid to late nineties I used America Online and the warez chat rooms. I found out Visual Basic was used to create bot programs and now I work for a big tech company.

I don't really remember. I guess I saw some cool stuff done with programming and wanted to make those things toom So I learnt Python.

It clicked at a young age, I've been good at it and enjoyed it since I was like 13. Found out it was profitable a little later and yeah, that's all it really took. Just the path of least resistance to be honest.

My elementary school had a "computer class" which taught typing the first year and then threw you into a room to play games for the next two years.

I got tired of it eventually and started learning how to program and build websites during my second year. Started doing breadboards and Raspberry PI stuff next year when they got a bit more funding. Knew I wanted to do programming ever since. Built web applications during high school and now I'm pursuing a worthless Comp Sci degree and loving every minute of it.

Such cool stories. You guys rock... Or are lying lol. I was once working in electronics job. I was running a circuit under test for which we had access to the source code for it. I was amazed by how source code turned into action. Once they out-source my job, I went to get CS degree. And... Now I work what is basically T1 IT