To give some context, I’m a developer myself and once I had a conversation with someone who has not “tasted” programming, but was wondering about passion and career. I was asked what I like about programming. My answer was that my interest in it came from writing small scripts when I was young to automate things.
Aside from being a career, I’m curious what got you into coding ?
My father, as a sysadmin with some coding knowledge, got me my first PC, some old tower with a GT 210. I was probably ~5 yo. After moving to a new house (for the fifth time), I got another PC, I think. This one was even older, but with Ubuntu Server it ran perfectly. My father taught me the basics, so cd, mv, nano and init, as we set up a minecraft server together.
A few christmases after that I got a new PC, the old one was promoted to a server and the old server was sorted out (in retrospect, keeping the floppy drive in there would’ve been kinda cool). Then a Pi was welcomed into the room, yet another server, as the old/new one broke, came too, this time it was a HP Mini Tower thingy. A Raspberry pi zero w for testing and stuff got here too.
But since I got the first server, I learned bash, ofc. Through Minecraft I got to Java, vanilla gets pretty boring after some time. Some time after, I decided to switch to Linux fully (I only dual booted Kali (and before someone starts to scream: I actually needed it)), as Windows kept getting buggier and shittier, I chose Pop as a daily driver. This screamed for custom scripting, so Python came to mind. At the same time I was interested in C# and learned it on my phone, because why not.
One or one and a half years ago I got sucked into depression even deeper, so I switched to my love, always, Arch. Going along was the desire to learn something even nerdier, so C/C++. I’m confident to say that I’m good in python, and OK in C#, so why not. Now I even program things sending and parsing web requests in C++, because speed.
TL;DR:
Strong personal interest since I was 10 through Minecraft (Java), Linux (Python), random other languages (C#, Ruby) and speedy languages (C/C++).
Now I see classmates, 18 years old, and of generation TikTok aka. “I press that button and there are pictures now” trying to learn programming. Fine, I guess, but they lack the most basic skill of all: Acquiring knowledge. Every answer needs to be prepared for them, everything else is inquired from ChatGPT.