On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 11:13:48PM +0530, Udhay Shankar N wrote: > This list contains a large number of self-taught programmers. How did > you get started, and how did you get to a moderate level of skill? (If > you want to talk about what happened after that, great, but I am more > interested in the first two stages)
I got started watching my dad do stuff, and typing in example programs from books and magazines, ages 4-6. I got to a moderate level of skill, well, probably in 1996 by getting a sysadmin job. Or maybe a little earlier by hacking around in shell and Perl in the computer labs at the university, or maybe a little later by posting to comp.lang.perl.misc and having my code criticized. I wrote about this at perhaps excessive length at <http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/000849.html>.
