We’re incredibly similar. We’re the same age, started coding and working at the same ages, and both acknowledge ADHD in our lives
I didn’t want to go to university, partly because my parents couldn’t help me and partly because I sucked at learning what I was asked to learn.
In response to the OG OP: Curiosity might kill this cat eventually but it certainly helped my career. Being a perfectionist and intensely curious allowed me to explore and refine my understanding of software production over many years.
16 years in I still often forget just how much I know and often feel like an imposter. I think this is exacerbated by career trajectory taking me away from the coal face of code writing over the years.
Nice, my programming soul mate! :) What did you start with?
I vaguely remember playing around with my father's Borland Turbo C++, but it went way over my head, a quick brush with Visual Basic for DOS, but it started to stick with VB6 first and Visual C++ a bit later, and building small desktop app for my father, an electronic engineer — so it was mostly fields and buttons that sent data over RS-232.
Then the Internet happened, so mIRC scripting, started playing with Linux and one day I stumbled upon on a website about open-source hobby OSes and spent a year out of school (dropped out) smoking weed and working on my own operating system (got up to the point of reading an ELF binary from ext2 and executing it). By that point I was 18, life happened, and I had to find a real, paying job.
And yeah... still feeling like an impostor. Looking for work atm, and I keep wondering if I'm good enough.
VB5 and 6 - AOL phishing and mIRC scripting. Wrote a few practical demos like p2p chat, then got fed up of the distribution challenges inherent in windows runtimes (back in the day) so got into web development via PHP. Now I almost exclusively build web-based software, fullstack.
I needed to get a job too. I was also into modding games. I got rejected from a low-paid game developer contract to make game textures that I could do in my sleep - I thought I was doomed. Then I got a break at a web agency, then worked for a startup on some SaaS and then started working for household names in London. And here I am focussing on serverless stuff, building teams, helping orgs. Amazing to think how lucky I am really. But a lot of hard work and sacrifice too.
Phishing for you, for me it was binding Sub7 to innocent binaries, sending it to people on IRC and then opening their CD drive when they least expected it. Fun times.
Nice to see you went through the mIRC phase as well. I keep thinking I should write an article on the lost art of mIRC scripts... it was all about writing code and feeling cool about it.
Oh, yeah! I did the Sub7 thing too. And Back Orifice. Good times. I was the scriptyist little script kiddie ever. I largely had no idea what I was doing, but whatever it was, I wanted to do it.
I didn’t want to go to university, partly because my parents couldn’t help me and partly because I sucked at learning what I was asked to learn.
In response to the OG OP: Curiosity might kill this cat eventually but it certainly helped my career. Being a perfectionist and intensely curious allowed me to explore and refine my understanding of software production over many years.
16 years in I still often forget just how much I know and often feel like an imposter. I think this is exacerbated by career trajectory taking me away from the coal face of code writing over the years.