- When I was 8 or 9, I had an MS DOS computer. The monitor was color, and it has QBASIC on it, and I had a book of QBASIC programs. I remember writing programs that would generate circles, with a random color, size, and location on the screen. I would also generate sounds, beeps really, in time with the circles. I didn't know about command line arguments, so every change I made I would do by changing the code itself. The numbers were all numeric literals. I got it running so fast that the filling of the circles couldn't keep up with their drawing. I liked making it go, and controlling it, and making music and shapes.
- When I was 13 or, we got a A dialup 28.8k modem, and a Windows Computer from Gateway. There was no built in programming language, but I liked chatting online, and eventually started using Mirc and writing a few scripts. There may be an archive of one or two somewhere, because I posted a few to some websites, back in the day. I learned about variables and conditionals. I liked getting the program to do what I wanted, and not having to type things repeatedly.
- I'm and about to graduate with a Bachelors Degree in Psychology. I had a great statistics professor, Jack Vevea, who has us do our classes using R. I did well, and I and another undergrad were invited to one of his graduate level courses in item response theory. We have a program where we had to calculate a value on 2400 elements. Each element took about 6 minutes with the program we were given, because it tries to calculate a value to a high degree of accuracy. That's 10 days of non-stop running. I look at the code and figure out how to narrow the search down at each iteration so it runs more quickly.
- I'm back in school, and I am learning C and Java. I take the data structures and Java for C programmers classes at the same time I take the prerequisite course, work really hard and get an A in all of them. I like learning, and working hard, and figuring things out.
- I find out about the tutor program. I join it, and and am made a mentor and senior tutor within the first week, on the basis of my work. I find out that I love helping people learn about programming, and that having to explain stuff makes me comprehend it better.
- I am looking through job postings for internships using my browser's find in page function, and realize I can write something to automate this for me. I write the first version of Gutsy, in Perl. I like being able to take what I know and use it in real everyday life.
I fell in love multiple times with programming. It wasn't a linear progression, where I learned to code a little when I was young. I had to come back to it, again and again, learning new things each time.
