alfie.wtf

Why I Am a Programmer

jruohonen · 232 points · 72 comments · hace 15 horas · Open original

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chr15mhace 10 horas

Conan the Barbarian and Below the Root on our Apple IIe. Tiny worlds behind the glowing Orange CRT. How do I make something like this? My mum (lol) helped me figure out how to get keyboard input in BASIC. I made a little game where an O character chases your X character around the screen. Core game loop. Browsing pirate CGA games at the warung in Pondok Indah, well outside the jurisdiction of US law. Glorious rack upon rack of tiny worlds to explore. Death Track and Prince of Persia. More BASIC and that gorilla throwing bananas. Later on the Multiline BBS. Talking late into the night with tech weirdos twice my age. All manner of mind bending ideas. Newsgroups. Punks and skaters and cypherpunks. Predicting what was coming, seeing the future we expected unfolding. Downloading Commander Keen over FTP. WinSock and Netscape. My first homepage. Downloading Linux and getting it running. Configuring XFree86 modelines all night lol. Turbo Pascal and VAX VMS at uni. My first job coding. Hacking out web backends in gnarly ass Perl. No databases just blatting and slurping comma delimited text files lol. Getting paid to do the most exciting thing there was to do, all day. Magic.

christophilushace 11 horas

For me, it was the creative, puzzle-solving, game-like nature of it. Then I got my first job, and I had 100% autonomy, so a friend of mine and I got to solve real problems for real people in the real world. It was a rush. Making people’s lives better through software is still the biggest motivation for me.

SA9Ghace 5 horas

Getting to build things without skinned knuckles or solder smoke in your face... now that is a rush! And if you are not happy with it, you get to tear it down and build it back up better. It costs nothing but your time and imagination. Importantly, you get to build, to solve problems, to engineer, to visualize, to create and be creative. (Ok, maybe musicians have even more fun, but alas I wasn't wired for music. :-)

SeriousMhace 10 minutos

25 years ago I figured out that building tools is what I love creating. And looking back, that's wat I really did well, for computers and for humans. About 20 years back I wished I could just express my way to build things and today it's possible! AI is just another tool to create toolings! Nice life!

gnabgibhace 14 horas

(2015) Even links to the HN discussion at the time (89 points, 59 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8837545