How old have you been when you started programming and what was your first project?

I was about 8 in the early-to-mid 90s. My father subscribed to the Sky & Telescope astronomy magazine, and one issue published the code listing for a simple three-body gravitational simulation in BASIC, so one afternoon he and I copied it down and got it running. That was the first; other early hits include the obligatory mucking around in GORILLA.BAS, an abortive text adventure after the style of Colossal Cave, and trying to port simpler C listings for fractal generators into BASIC with some success -- I could grasp the program structure and translate the algorithms, but couldn't handle C's more complex toolchain and lack of a dead-simple PSET to plot a pixel.

I know WBB2, back then WoltLab's community was pretty much limited to the DACH region, I guess.

I actually started modding the lite version when I was around 11, together with two online friends I built quite the community around some kids' chatroom. :D

Then, when gaming clans boomed around here I switched to a certain CMS and I worked with designers to make templates (and later even addons) for it.

Hum, it was in BASIC (not even on a proper computer, it was more like a big calculator). I was maybe about 10-11 years old.

All pick 2 random numbers between 0 and 10 and ask you what their product was, and checked if it was right.

Catch: you could only have one program at a time. If you want to make a new thing, erase everything first!.

As a freshman in college, 1988, I found that the school I attended did not require the two years of foreign language I took, but instead wanted a class on computer (BASIC on DOS) literacy. So I took a remedial course my first semester.

I was a gamer and occasional DM at the time, so I wrote a tool to print off a page or so of random 1-6 numbers. And then I did it again, and got the same list of "random" numbers. Computers are deterministic and don't really understand random, so you must seed your random number generators. (Plus, for crypto, use the small remainders of key punching times or a webcam pointed at a lava lamp or something.)

I also developed code that would allow me to easily switch between 1-6 and 1-12 or 1-20 (because AD&D needed all available dice styles) but the GOTOs jumping in and out were frustrating and weird, making me understand why people prefer subroutines rather than GOTOs, which are "considered harmful".

I then didn't write another thing for something like seven years, while using computers constantly.

In 2012 I was a sophomore in high school taking trigonometry and I hated it. I had some games on my TI-84 graphing calculator and found I could view and edit the code. I think the language is TI BASIC or something like that. I ended up making a full fledged blackjack game that semester. I wish I still had the calculator because I'm sure the code was awful-- I had no concept of a for loop or any basic programming principles. All my variable names were single letters

I started programming around 17 in high school. My first program I built was a small maze type game in game maker. And then right after that I started working in rpg maker and built a bigger game demo. For a state wide game competition. And it pretty much took off from there.

When I was 15, I was very lucky to have a teacher for the high school "computers" course that, instead of word and excel, taught us how to program in BASIC. He even gave us some Computer Science knowledge (sorting algorithms and others).
We were so excited that we used to do extra programming classes in the afternoon so the teacher proposed to create a program to compute the D'Hondt method for allocating seats in the local election.
The election day we were present in the counting process taking samples and using them as inputs in our program. We even won a price for that project.
That was my first programming project.

I got sidetracked in math class when I was 14 figuring out how to program my TI-84. I played with that for a year or two before I wrote any code on a real computer.

My first projects were prank programs on other people’s calculators that returned wrong answers. The best one? Replacing the output of trig functions with random values. No one understood trig yet, so they didn’t know...

(I have since moved on to less dastardly deeds)

I was about 13 or 14 years old. I used to go to Books-A-Million about once a month. One trip I saw the C++ for Dummies book and had my mom buy it for me. I only made one program in it and that was a F to C and C to F temperature converter. I didn't understand what I was doing so I stopped messing with programming. That is, until a year ago. Now I'm in Lambda School for computer science and web dev. But I did work as a FED fora company building out and Styling their React components only that company flopped 6 months before my contract ended.

I built my first website in the 5th grade. I don't remember what it was about, but I fell in love with the process. Then over the years I built some websites and did some freelance work.

Then, at 21, I often used a language learning website and I didn't like it how the team treated the users and how slow they were to implement new features. I thought that I would manage to build such a platform for myself by myself. I knew I would fail, but I wanted to try. I knew nothing about web programming and what technology I needed, so I opened their vacancies and saw that they were hiring senior Django developers. This is how I learned about Django. Then I opened Django tutorial and started building. I finished the website in eight months, three months after I landed my first job as a Python backend developer.