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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, and eventually I got a scholarship to go to college for computer engineering.

Currently between personal projects while I write platform code for autonomous vehicles. I do some personal web stuff and embedded IoT for smart home bits & bobs.

Hobbyist, professional, hobbyist.

Started with the VIC-20 shortly after the birth of my son. Ended up teaching a few community association recreational classes, which led to teaching introductory programming (among other things) at a private tech school.

That, in turn led to a few requests for small custom programs, software modifications, etc, and eventually my own freelance programming business doing everything from shop floor work order management to Palm Pilot integrations with, yes, mainframe systems.

When that business failed, I went to work full-time for my only remaining client. When that business was sold, the new owners made it clear that I was dead weight, so I left the field entirely and we moved to our cabin at the lake. (That was also the beginning of 10 years with no internet or cell service at home. Now we have Starlink.)

A decade later, I’m about to retire completely and I’m slowly getting back into it as a hobby.

I’ve always been a bit of a language junkie, but my current focus is on go, mostly because I’d like to better understand what’s going on under the hood in my current favourite language, Charm, which is written in go.

In retirement, assuming I can pull myself away from my shop and my fishing rod, I hope to build an as yet undetermined bit of software that others find useful or contribute to a project.

Found out I’m really fucking good with Databases and SQL after failing my coding courses when I wanted to be a programmer. 15 years later I’m still going strong with a good career with Databases.

I’d love to be able to make my own API for a personal project and design a front-end for it but no matter how hard I try I can’t get my head around the software dev side of things

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.

I have been working as a web developer, now a manager and less of a coder, for over 20 years.

Whenever I get the chance to tell this story, I always credit the game Command and Conquer: Red Alert for beginning my journey into coding and web development. This was long before auto matchmaking, so to play with other people you had to know their IP address in order to connect directly. To help with this, there was a chat app that came with the game called Westwood Online. While at first it was used for the intended purpose, I also met my first “Internet girlfriend” in those chat rooms, back when such a thing was confusing and scandalous to my parents. Eventually I joined a Star Wars RPG “guild”, and of course we needed a way to document to other guilds how amazing our imaginary spaceship collection was, so I volunteered to make a website. I wish I still had it, but just imagine a Geocites website with clunky frames and lots of pictures of different Star Destroyers or X-Wings.

After that I was absolutely hooked. Video games moved to the background and most of my solo free time was spent on various coding projects. I was fortunate enough to be in the first wave of “webmasters”, starting with free hosting platforms like Geocities, Angelfire and Tripod. Anyone else remember web rings?? I don’t remember now how I found it, but my first “real” coding experience was after joining a forum called NeoPages. I had to write an application and be interviewed first, but eventually was given FTP access to my very own website, no ads or limitations! That’s really when my journey as a developer began. (I ended up being one of the primary administrators when I got older and the owner didn’t have time, now in retrospect I can see how that was a very important learning experience.)

I started working at a local web design company in high school and continued working there part-time during the semester and full-time in the summers throughout college. I almost burned out from that due to an insanely manipulative and verbally abusive boss, but lucked into an even better job when I had a lunch with the former co-partner to the bad boss. I was really just looking for some advice as I got ready to graduate but I left that lunch with a job offer!

Fast forward to the 2008 financial crisis and the small business he was running, of which I was employee #3 for after his sister, ends up falling apart. Most of our business came from a marketing agency that was literally down the street, so they snatched up me and another developer to maintain the dozen sites we had built for them in the last few years. That place was chaotic at first, but the leadership at the top was smart enough to invest in digital before many of our competitors, letting things grow and then knowing when to pull back and focus on the business side of the process, too. (Fun story, the very first meeting I was part of after moving to the agency, still on contract and not a FTE yet, the owner of the whole agency comes in and tells us the last project was 300% over budget. I can’t even imagine that happening now, at worst we would have realized something was wrong by the time we ended the first sprint!)

I’ve now been at that agency for 14 years as of last week! I never thought I would stay in one place or enjoy being a manager, but I’ve come to love the mentoring side of my job more than the technical side. Now that I am nearing my 40s, it’s also nice to have a stable employer in a region that does not have many similar opportunities–most of our clients are out of state, so before the rise of remote working I would have had to moved away from my entire family to find an equivalent job (both in terms of the kind and quality of work we do and financially). I’m still learning new things all of the time, too, even if I am not necessarily the one writing code myself.

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.

Professional. I started out with Basic, then QBasic and Java in high school. Made a Geocities site.

Years later, I was bored and decided to learn Python. Had enough fun doing that that I decided to go to school for it.

Now I’m a full-time programmer, mostly doing web app stuff. I spend much, much less time doing programming for fun, but I’m a huge fan of learning new languages.

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!

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’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.