I think this is a great question to ask when interviewing someone for a job related to IT or having to do with code. I personally find these stories fascinating, because they tell you so much about a person, much more so than the typical “prove you know to do fors and recursion via Fibonacci” exercises, which by the way, I think are useless and a waste of time.
My story
It would be rude of me not to tell you my story now, wouldn’t it? Well, let’s face it, I’m a computer geek and always have been, so that might have had something to do with it. But that is so broad isn’t it? No one is just “a geek” or a nerd or whatever; we are all so different.
For me it was the curiosity of making things work that drove me to learn a progamming language. And video games, definitely video games. I was 11 and really liked a game called Diablo II, so I wanted to make a website for mexican Diablo II players, so I started fiddling with a magic pieces of software (back then, it was magic for me) like Dreamweaver and Corel Photopaint and a hosting site called geocities. I migrated then to Lycos (or was it Tripod? Angelfire? I don’t remember quite well).
I was also very fond of IRC (chat servers) and used a client called mIRC. This was a time when nobody knew what #this was except IRC users. I really wanted to make silly effects with text so that it had colors and made shapes with all sorts of ASCII characters, and I downloaded a very modded version of mIRC called X-CRiPt, so messing with mIRC’s scripting language I figured out how all those pretty effects were done and I really liked being in control of what I was using, it was a sudden sense of empowerment and “aha!” moment: I realized that if I messed up hard enough, I could get things done my way and share my achievements with the world! I named my modded version “AleXCRiPt” (so creative, I know…) and published it in my Diablo II page… because reasons.
From there it was all about challenging myself to do things that I didn’t know how to do. There was this one time I found a website called fusionnintendo.net, a news website focused on Nintendo (it was the Nintendo GameCube era) ran by teens like me, and I liked it a lot, but the “Cheats” section of the site was lacking, and I don’t know why but I’ve always been a fan of entering cheat codes to do crazy stuff in video games, so I contacted them to ask them to “hire me” (and by hiring I meant doing it for free and feeling good about running a popular video games news website) to program a Cheats section. Then we re-did the whole website from scratch, and it was amazing. I didn’t even know that I was programming something like a Wordpress engine before it even existed. And that’s how I learned PHP, CSS, XHTML and Javascript. It was a great experience and I learned a lot. We were very naive though, as teens, because the site was really popular and we never actually thought of some kind of business or monetization, we did it because it was fun. The weird part was we all lived in different cities across the country, and to date we’ve never “met” (as in, face to face).
I then got into university and studied IT and Systems Engineering and got a job and all that usual stuff that happens next. But I wouldn’t be who I am without these things happening in my life, I wouldn’t be in a computer stuff career doing what I like for a living if I hadn’t been curious and did what I liked without thinking about how profitable it would be to do it or not. I think I have to go back to thinking like that, because now as an adult, I tend to focus on how to make money out of everything, and it’s not that that’s entirely wrong because I have to eat, but it sometimes takes the magic of doing things “just because” out of it. The best of times have come when I don’t know what the hell I am doing and just go for it.
Now when I interview someone for a coding or software related job I always ask this:
- Do you like video games? FIFA doesn’t count. (I know it’s stupid but whatever I’m the one asking questions now! Mwahaha..)
- How did you get into coding?
I hope this was interesting to someone, if it’s not it will be OK too because the very reason why I wrote it was to not think about something and just do it.
I want to finish with a challenge to some friends. Because I would love to hear more stories about how programmers got into coding. So I’m ripping off the Ice Bucket Challenge thing, yeah, whatever. The 3 people listed below have to write their story about how they got into coding in less than a week from when this is published.
- @caguilar
- @Darkade
- @juliettemaxwell
Else, you owe me dinner at a fancy burger joint ☺. And they have to nominate three more people and link their stories too. I don’t know if this will work… but if you want to publish your story please finish with that challenge. I will use the hashtag #MyCodingStory if you want to play the game. English is not a rule, it doesn’t have to be on Medium either. So tell your story and force your friends to tell their story, go on, do it now!
I liked Medium, it was good to just write my head out without the hassle of setting up stuff. I will try to write more ☺
IG: alkz | T: @aalkz | W: geekthegeek.com | 500px: alkz
