GitHub’s Post

I got annoyed at Dreamweaver in 6th grade, specifically at the way everything was done with “tables”. Flexbox didn’t exists then, just hacking the layout with margins and padding instead tables and cells is where it started. In 2011, I discovered (and recommended) Wix for a website one of my colleagues and I wanted to build for gap year students. We hit a wall when we wanted to customised the themes, so I started staying up late learning about other ways to build interactive pages. In 2013, I got sick of jquery based sliders and started learning about how to manipulate the DOM directly with pure JavaScript. React, Vue and Node.js showed up to the party pretty soon after Angular and I never looked back at PHP.

🥹 I went to a computer shop with my uncle for a repair and started exploring more. I got more into programming in grade 8, starting with HTML, CSS, and JS. In high school, I learned C++ and used to complete other students’ projects for 10-20 Indian rupees.

My dad's a programmer, so I was always around it. But one summer, I was bored and lived too far from friends to go hang out with them all the time, and my dad had just picked up this 'Learn HTML in 24 Hours' book, so I decided to try it out. Of course, being 11 and totally ADHD (inattentive type), that book was boring and I couldn't get past the 2nd lesson; however, I learned from that book that I could just View Source and figure it out from websites already up and running. I was hooked from then on. 💜

My Grandfather gave me his old Commodore 128 and 100+ computer leaflets from his computer club. I gleaned every piece of information I could. Wrote my first program at 7. By nine I had written my first game. We stored data on tape recorders back then. Then came BBS (bulletin board systems); a precursor to the internet. I've been hooked ever since. GitHub 😉

I get into coding when I have the desire to build an application

When I was a kid, I was curious on how the computer represented files, since I have heard that computers only store data with 0s and 1s. I remember opening an application with notepad and finding strange characters. This convinced me that such characters should hold some information on the behavior of the program, since they did not make any sense at all, but they were the content of the executable file so they should've been explicative, in some way. Some months later I had the opportunity to talk with a relative that made a living off software engineering and he introduced me to Java. Nonetheless, I clearly remember not understanding the principles (what is a class?) and felt a little bit frustrated. Therefore, searching on internet, I discovered that C++ was more "direct" and was very easy to configure with dev c++. I started doing some simple stuff and then I found an introductory chapter about html and javascript in a school book, and started learning both. This was more than 15 years ago, and I still remember the feeling when I run my first hello world in c++ not knowing what a stream operator was but knowing what "std::cout <<..." did.

One night when I was Student at the university (15 years before) I was sleeping and somewhere around 04:00 am my roommate started asking me to get up fast to see something. He implemented an android app that was able to order coffee from a machine that he created using arduino as well. At that point the only thing I had in mind was to go back to sleep but the next morning I was thinking that this guy had the same background with me and was coming from a family of farmers from a small village as I am. This was a huge motivation to make me start 💪 Thanks to this guy

I was 11 or 12 years old and a friend sold his Commodore 64. So I learned BASIC from a book I got from the library and by trying out things. That feeling as a kid, seeing a computer do things you told him to do... That was magic! Fast forward 27 years later and that feeling of magic is still there. It still tingles when you work on a complex programming question and see it work... (I became a professional when I dropped out of college and pursued a career as a self-taught webdeveloper +13 years ago)