On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 7:43 PM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]> 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)
Stage 1: Learned programming to "scratch an itch" Stage 2: It became a passion I didn't really like computers when I first encountered them at around age 9. They were precious things kept locked away in clean rooms; I couldn't really tell what function it served. I had to wait 10 years to get a computer of my own. I was 19, and by now computers had become more popular, everyone around me was enrolled in NIIT or some other trade school and learning programming. This didn't make much sense to me because well, only programmers needed to learn programming, right? I bought a computer to learn how best I could put it to use as an accountant (I was finishing my B.Com and ACS degrees then, so this is how I viewed myself). I had this very expensive computer and two books on Windows and the Internet in front of me on day one, day 5 I had read both the books, and knew how to use a mouse and use IRC. Day 30 I had a book on Unix in front of me; day 90 I was a "successful" (got r00t) script kiddie, I sort of knew how /etc/shadow could be exploited. It sort of gets fuzzy afterwards, but I was spending all hours that I was awake in front of this machine. I also discovered real friends in the Linux community. I got tired pretty quickly of being a script kiddie, there was no talent in that; I was discovering religion of sorts with GNU and my skill as a programmer was growing. There's a lot more that happens after this, but a year or so of this later would be my stage 2 when I was receiving job offers purely by word of mouth. Cheeni
