Why I Am a Programmer

It was slow but allowed some text based games we then shared. No internet so did it all from trial and error.

Then ... i wanted a 3D Cube rotating. At 15/16 this was a bit too much i guess i had no idea about rotation matrices back then and deemed myself a bit dense.

Never got around doing 3D stuff at work, only databases all the time. I dabbled some with ThreeJS but i guess i was still haunted.

BUT THEN. Geometric algebra! So smooth. If you like tables and had problems with stuff like cross products or quaternions, didnt like copy pasting rotation matrices, etc. YOU WILL LOVE geometric algebra! It's like you meet 2 tables on a FK and bam its a volume (highly simplified!!)

Just my 2 cents. Don't write yourself off if you did not do 1337 demos in primary school on a tamagotchi.

Many people struggle finding a career, for me it was pretty obvious from the start that I liked programming (and maths) and that I could make a living doing that. Competitive sports or music may be examples, but unlike programmers, very few people do actually make a living doing so.

I saved up to buy a VIC-20 (a 4K computer) and later a C64, writing games for both. Those were magical days I will look back to fondly. That sparkle has not left, though I sometimes miss the purity of near-bare-metal systems of yesteryear.

Like some in my generation, I lived through and contributed to some of the early phases of computing, pre-internet, and am altogether grateful for it.

Wish now I'd started earlier. It's like having a special power if your actual job isn't programming. I like getting the computer to do my job for me.

It was an ACE cracktro for International Karate that was putting huge things in the borders, something about it stuck to my mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ODIb5r_fS8

When the teacher said show your work I wrote out the program I made to calculate the equation. They banned calculators altogether.

Once there was a computer I traded sleep to stay on it. I worked professionally for almost 3 decades and it ultimately cost me my health and mental health. It was often my own insecurities and anxiety that led me up the ladder.

I left the field and went to work for something I believe in and my tech skills are like wizardry to these folks.

There is a lot of blue sky to explore for people in tech.

Since the subject of BBS has been raised, I wanted to mention BBS-over-teletext, which used the bidirectional CATV connection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext#Uses They never took off, owing to the difficulty of typing with a remote control, but at least they did not hog the phone line, or rack up a bill.

My first program was in 2nd grade on an Apple IIe in basic. It was a program to check if a word was worth a dollar (a=1, b=2, c=3...)

It became a family activity (every one taking turns at the computer) every night to just type in words and see what they came out to. It was all very boring.

I was sure I was going to win.

I lost (well 2nd place), to the kid with 6 older brothers, who had that many years of building out the family list.

Gonna take a look at the tutorial later this week, I always wanted a glimpse of how those demoscene folks did their magic.

https://youtu.be/YUqn1OPxtmE

… but don’t give me hate… I still code with my hands :)

Fast forward a few years, my mom, who was a teacher at the time brought home the materials from an HTML class she took. She never did anything with it, but I made a few Geocities pages.

I skipped over the whole Myspace customization thing because I was too busy fooling around with Arduinos. I ended up making a controller for the veggie oil system in my car using what I learned.

Lucky for me, I waited until about 2020 to start getting serious about doing it for a living, right as the bottom fell out of the industry, and here I am.

In the evenings, after the kids go to sleep, I work on my side-project, an app that lets you preorder coffee from the local cafe so you don't have to wait so long. I've been working on it for six months and I dream of the day I can quit the day job and work on it full time.

Our very first "real" program was some local network chat system, which I found extremely fascinating - because I had suddenly gone from writing a bunch of terminal/CLI programs which felt a bit...boring, to writing something which felt like "proper" software.

Last day, I realize it wasn't 2000. It was 8000, and there was not a snowballs chance in hell I could do the remaining 6000 in time for the deadline. So I went online, found pieces on stack overflow for this disgusting nodejs script that was 8 for loops deep, and then ran it against all the files. It took like.... a second, and all the files were just done. Poof, instant.

I got a job as a programmer and never looked back. The last ~decade has been a wild ride of highs and lows, but I still love doing it every day. There's just something deeply satisfying of taking an idea, and the computer just doing it.

Edit: removing reference to the leading "How", that seems to be done editorially by the poster of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50227356

nice blog :) cracked loose some fond memories.

I've been behind the 8-ball at $dayjob, for reasons I don't have a say in, nor does anyone in my entire CoC. Vendors are delayed, we have hard shipping deadlines on our end.

Work pays for an expensive "AI" sub. I used it because I'm in a jam and deadlines are tight.

It worked. I'm a decent engineer/programmer. The tech saved me a month, at least. I think the money around all this tech is wrong and bad, but in a vacuum the tech works.

Coding, computers, building whatever shit I wanted: that's the first thing that 'made sense' to me. And remained the only thing. What else am I gonna do?

BBSs were how I learned everything because there wasn’t really anybody near me in my little rural area of the world that had a computer let alone knew how to program them. Internet wasn’t public yet, just getting out of the lab.

What I grew up in was the counter-cultural era of tech. Distrust of authority. Freedom of expression. Queer. Weird. Against the War on Drugs, neoliberalism, police, all that.

Demos were huge. Scrolls were also huge. Mods were huge. Good times. When I think of back then I still hold out hope for today.