Personally, I started off with Roblox back in the early 2010s, and taught myself Lua. I really liked those Tycoon games, and wanted to see how they worked.
I eventually found Minecraft (like every kid back in the day did), and learnt Java to make Bukkit server mods.
Around 2016 I thought websites were kinda cool, so I started learning HTML, CSS, and JS, and I’ve been in the web dev space ever since.
What about the rest of y’all? What’s your personal programming path?
I think my first push was when I was 12 reading a local popular science magazine and it had an article about a 13 year old kid who had made a very successful iOS game. After that I talked about how I want to do programming so much that my parents got me a “Python for Dummies” book.
Self-learning programming at such a young age was very difficult, I tried to turn to online forums for help and was met with extreme amounts of abuse. The worst by far was StackOverflow and I’ve hated the site with passion ever since. Things turned around when I started to ask for help on a local social network similar to Facebook and people seeing that I was a kid there were extremely helpful. I still remember the founder of the site even answering a couple of questions I had. I really wanted to work there after these positive experiences, but by the time I grew up the site had been ran into the ground.
After that I had some experience doing some game dev stuff. I played around with game maker, later on made some Minecraft server plugins for Bukkit. One of them even reached over 1000 downloads and is still by far the most successful solo project I’ve ever published haha.
Where I really started to establish my skills was when I switched schools and the new one had a competitive programming extra curricular class. After being a very active participant there I ended up winning many state level awards at competitive programming, even went for some regional international contests.
Then years later I joined university and absolutely hated it. It almost turned me off of programming just being teached decades old programming knowledge. Waterfall project management etc. One memory of mine is explaining basic c++11 features to the TA because he had never seen them. This was in 2018. There was only one good course I had and I enjoyed - Linux System Programming. I hated the rest so much I dropped out and now am a professional software developer. Still feel like the time I spent at university was just extremely wasted.
I feel like universities have a special opportunity to teach really cool concepts that would be impractical in bootcamps and such; learning about the maths behind algorithms and data structures, how to evaluate them objectively, learning about grammars and expressions, building interpreters / compilers, all this stuff that can be really useful if you find yourself working beyond simple CRUD stuff.
That being said, these days so much work is just CRUD, so ymmv.
I think I just had a bad experience with choosing a local university and believing the lies that it’s top university in my country and is comparable to foreign ones. I have a lot of friends who studied abroad and their programs sounded so much more useful and up to date. I’ve thought about enrolling into a foreign university from time to time but the amount of sour taste my local one left and how comfortable I am already in the job market makes it a very difficult decision.
It’s interesting you experienced this too, when I was in uni (2014ish) we were taught both waterfall and agile, but they made a point that a lot of businesses will prefer waterfall and that agile isn’t professional.
Professionally, I’ve literally never seen anyone say they want or prefer waterfall project management.
This was a UK university well known for its programming and computing, too.