What's your coding origin story?

As a kid I played games on PC a lot. They (parents and the rest of the family) said that I was addicted and that being on the PC will never bring anything positive in my life. I said that I will one day earn for living using PC, they laughed...

• Mom owns a computer repair ship since 1994. She got laid off at Bell and had to become an entrepreneur.
• In 1998 (I would have been 11) she was being asked to make websites. Since I spent all my time playing around in Microsoft FrontPage I made websites for her customers and business friends.
• By 2005 I had enough money from building websites to go to College to learn how to build websites.
• When I was at College I skipped most of my classes and stayed as long as I could on campus to utilize their servers where I spent my 3 years learning Ruby on Rails.
• After College, I lived with my Grandma working on remote website jobs online (mostly for career/life coaches) while also trying to break into the web-dev industry.
• My parents told me to get a real job, anything, like work at a gas station and I ignored them.
• I started contributing to an open-source project for 2 weeks and after contributing so much I had to stop since I needed to focus on paid work.
• My contributions were so valuable they hired me as their CTO and flew me to Barcelona.

I've been a CTO ever since.

What's the formula here?

free_open_source_contributes   = 2.weeks
self_study                     = 3.years
repetitive_fundamental_tasks   = 10000
ignore parents                 = true

Someone suggested I make this an Instagram story. Instagram is something people use right?

Pixel doll forums, I wanted to showcase my little pixels so I had to learn how to code a website, luckily for me, other members had tutorials on how to make them. Girls teaching girls. It was fun during that time.

After that, I went to university and learned how to truly program/code/develop/that and at work I learned my limitations and areas to improve (which I'm working on) :3

So here I am. I think my origin story is pretty fluffy lol

I was at 7th grade, a lot of my classmates had Nokia cellphones that could access the Internet. They started playing online games and it was super fun at the moment because we were all new to this. A female friend of mine had a cellphone with a T9 keyboard that she always let me and my dude borrow at break time.

We tried installing some games but failed as the phone didn't support Java. So we Googled what Java was, and it led to the "wap" sites where my friends downloaded games, and then there were some forums where people guided how to create a wap site.

2 curious boys started the journey from here. We learned the basic structure of an HTML page. We screamed like crazy when we made the text move on the screen with the tag, or when our tags had gradient CSS background. All that with a borrowed cellphone at break time!

2 years later I got my own cellphone. It had a great feature: QWERTY keyboard! I coded on my phone, without looking at the keyboard! I contributed to a wap forum which helped people who were creating wap sites. I became an admin there. Those feelings of helping people, solving their programming problems, being responsible as an admin of a forum... are precious! There were nights I didn't sleep just to chat with my friends there.

Now I am programmer, work my dream job but I'll never forget my past. So motivated whenever I reminisce it back.

I think I first got interested in computers because my dad was... but my parents were separated and I actually didn't have much time with him, so that interest never really got nurtured.

My true origin with coding was Geocities, and it wasn't an abstract interest in coding, I was most fascinated because some 9th grade kids in my school had created a little "online business" through Geocities and I thought that was the coolest thing.

I was in 7th grade. We didn't have a computer at home at the time, but my friend got into Geocities to make a website for his band, so I spent a ton of time at his house and school computers creating my website, which was a fantasy sports news site.

Growing up in the 80s, my parents owned a computer because of work. They had some games and let me play... but I was limited to 30 minutes Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It was one of the computers that had a system disk, then load MSDos, then change the floppy disk to the application/game one... and that took time out of my 30 minutes! I learned how to create a small menu using batch files, so I could save some time instead of typing all the commands. I don’t know if that counts as programming, but it definitely was the door to it.

I will admit my story goes through a lot of changes so it all started back in high school whereas a Senior I wanted to major in Culinary Arts thinking that I would be the best Chef possible and one day own my own restaurant.

It wasn't until my parents and I went to a local culinary arts school in the city and after the tour discussed out tuition and payment plans where things started to get intense. After the adviser broke down the tuition costs and fees my parents needed to sleep on it because it was an expensive school at the time. That next morning I woke up and my mother was waiting upstairs in the dining ready to talk to me about their decision and what she thinks is best. Basically she told me that I would not be able to attend that school due to the high tuition costs and at the time I didn't know how to drive so I would have had to catch two buses to get to the school (This was worry some for my parents since the school was located in Baltimore City). After she laid down the bad news she handed me a community college page that had a list of majors to choose from the list. At that point, I was upset that I would have to change majors but I didn't want to put any stress or burden on my parents.

As I was looking through the list of majors I saw Game development listed as a major and decided to enlist in fall 2013 as a Game Development major. After the fall semester, I took a semester off to work for a bit and get money to pay for my next few semesters and learn how to drive. Coming back fall 2014 semester, my mother had another conversation with me about the longevity of being a game developer which made me do some research into job prospects of game development within my state and in general. As I saw game development wasn't something I wanted to do anymore since it was an industry that I didn't want to do long term.

During my winter break, I decided to do research and logical reasoning to see what major I could switch to before continuing in the spring. Luckily I found out that game development was a subcategory under the world of computer science! And I then came across software engineering which made me super excited when I researched more about it. After that, I changed my major to computer science! The rest is history, ever since then its been a long bumpy road through this major and occupation/career path but its all worth it! I have to thank my parents and especially my mom for pushing me to evaluate my life choices carefully and ultimately choosing one of the coolest and best occupations ever!

TL;DR:
Basically, I changed my major three times starting at Culinary Arts -> Game Development -> Computer Science, my mom was the source of reasoning for changing my career path.

I received a radioactive web-crawler byte...

(I'll get my coat)

When I was in 7th grade we were all into an online FPS called WarRock that had a shit ton of hackers in it. One night I was specially pissed at the amount of cheaters we had encountered so I decided to do some digging and ended up finding cheats for myself. After trying it out, getting a few accounts banned and generally becoming what I once despised, I started getting curious on how people did that stuff. So I did some more searches, installed a few things (vírus most likely) and after getting a very basic grasp on VB6,I made my own hacking tool. Took a few weeks but after getting it to work I actually managed to keep it updated throughout game updates (the pointers would change on each update) and distributed it online for free (and it had a shit ton of hacks that people used to pay for!). It was a fun year. Now I dont do those tools anymore but I still hold that beginning very dearly in my mind.

I get paid to make sure people like my 7th grade me dont hack our shit.

I think mine is quite boring but it really changed my life.

I always wanted to do engineering of some sort. I enjoyed maths, physics and science in general. However, there are a ton of engineering disciplines and could not decide which one to follow.

My dad, just mentioned one day, a few months before making my university application.

You should try programming / computer science

He gave me a C for dummies book (probably not the best for a noob). I made some basic app, like a tax calculator, something like that. I flipping loved it.

I then did some VB stuff which was making the colour of a window change. I was sold.

I put together my uni application and haven't looked back. I thank my dad for a lot of things, but I think this one tops everything else. Just one comment that he said to me, about a profession I never considered. Completely changed my life.

I love software and can't imagine doing anything else now. Man. I feel like I'm getting emotional saying this stuff.