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 ?
I saw a lot of software and in my stubbornness I thought “that’s awfully designed, I can do better than this.”
This was me too - I wanted to do things my computer couldn’t do, and so I figured out how to make it happen. Absolutely the best way to learn in my opinion and so much easier today than it was when I learned.
Then my dad’s friend needed some software and I knew how to do that… so I did. It was fun, and at the end he was like “so how much do I owe you?” and I was like “what? I have no idea. Didn’t expect to get paid”. He gave me a few hundred bucks and I did a few more small projects along those lines, and a bunch of open source work, before getting a job as a junior developer.
Been doing it for over 20 years now - money was never the goal, but I do earn a decent living thankfully.