• Lnrdrople@suppo.fi
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      1 year ago

      Yeah… Decades later I still sometimes think about making video games, but never have any time to do more than write down a quick idea. Maybe one day…

    • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Lol, that was me. Took a course on game development and the professor said “I don’t advise a career in game development unless you can deal with crunch”. Now I treat HTTP requests in python and question my life choices.

  • starbreaker@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • autokludge@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    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 👌

    • Omgpwnies@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I do test automation, getting a particularly difficult test scenario working in automation is 🤌

  • jadero@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • calypsopub@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • killeronthecorner@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • SeriousBug@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      Same. I wanted to make video games… until I found out how terrible the working conditions and pay are.

    • SrTobi@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Same here. Always wanted to do cool games. But wanted to have an even cooler scripting language for the game. At some point programming languages became more interesting. Now working in ide development :D never finished a game

  • m105@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • RandomDevOpsDude@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    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

  • pudcollar [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    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.