I’m always interested in hearing other’s stories and what they’re working on. Anyone care to share?
Both, though since going pro, I have less time for hobby coding. Or rather I should say, my eyes and brain can only take so much.
I’ve been a hobbyist script guy for a long time, and had no aspirations to start a career as a SWE. The opportunity just fell into my lap, when I joined a startup in an entry level support position, and wrote some tools to make my workflows easier. A director took notice, and got me a position on a new engineering team. The rest is history. Turns out I really like doing it professionally, as well.
I’m a BE engineer, working mostly in Python. Telecommunications stuff, can’t really say more.
I started off in 2005 on Neopets. There was a feature that let you create your own custom pages for anything which I thought was the coolest thing at the time. I had to learn HTML and CSS to get started.
Turns out that was way cooler than Neopets. Don’t get me wrong, Neopets is awesome, but I absolutely fell in love with building with code back then. Fast-forward to now, I’m a senior dev at a VC studio helping various startups get off the ground.
I’m a fan of learning and building, so it’s kept me in this career ever since. It’s been fun seeing the times change with all sorts of tech. Am a giant fan of FOSS and love contributing where I can.
I did the neopets thing too! I remember having to ask the local library to acquire books that taught HTML and CSS so I could learn it!
Started as a hobbyist; took it up professionally, but never stopped hobbying. It was the BASIC listings for simple games in 3-2-1 Contact magazine that hooked me; books, family, and later the Internet helped me learn more and grow, and eventually I got a scholarship to go to college for computer engineering.
Currently between personal projects while I write platform code for autonomous vehicles. I do some personal web stuff and embedded IoT for smart home bits & bobs.
I clearly lost a bet about 10 years ago that we’d have autonomous cars everywhere by now.
As an insider of DevOps. It’s not really that magical for most firms or that new it’s mostly marketing fluff made to sell more capable admins.
What’s your cynical take on autonomous vehicles?
It’s a really really hard problem and while lots of really really smart people are trying really really hard to make them happen, it’s still going to take a really really long time and people are going to be really really resistant to the idea while Tesla keeps making the technology look really really bad, which is already starting to result in the government get really really suspicious and pass some really really stupid laws that will really really hurt progress.
Even once we’ve got real robot cars on the road, it’s going to be a niche novel technology for a good while since people are too stupid to realize that we’re far worse drivers. There may be an iPhone moment by some current or new player in the field, making the service sexy and attractive and even fashionable islf not merely desirable; the current prevalence of services like Uber will help with this cultural shift, but it’s way too early to tell exactly what this will look like.
Autonomous vehicles in some shape or form are an inevitability, but it might just end up boring, hamstrung, or relegated to basic operations like forklifts or shuttles.
Started out apprenticing as a Sysadmin, have been doing that until I got into DevOps. Always had an interest in programming as I was always limited in what I could do by what people had already created.
I’ve used Python, JavaScript, Golang, and now Rust over the course of my career.
Currently learning wasm and how Rust’s borrow checker and generics get along.
Professional but even if I wasn’t I’d still be coding for fun. Since having my first child I haven’t done many side projects but my day job satisfies most of my development passion.
I develop/maintain a mammoth of a Frankenstein application that used in the trucking/shipping industry. The main bones are built in perl/mysql but there’s some PHP, Python, React, and for a reason no one knows, an ASP/C# portion.
I personally love the wide range of tickets and languages I get to mess around with. I’m currently taking elastic courses to get certified paid for by the company which has been great.
I love to code, but suck at coming up with ideas haha
I studied it before back in 08-09. Then I stepped away and did other things but came right back to it. Finishing my CS degree this December :)
I’m hoping to be a professional software engineer.
Professional, but I’m an engineer at heart and simply love all things engineering, including mechanical.
I started with C++ at school. I really liked it, but when it was time for summer I taught myself C# and that’s how I got a job.
I’m currently migrating the backend of our company from relational to non relational DB, and a lot of other goodies.
Professional C developer (Firmware Engineer). Also do a lot of work with ASM, and some Python in there, too. I’ve always loved it, though, and sometimes do it for fun as well. Programming Arduinos in C++ and the like.
I actually started later in high school at some summer camp doing C++ and fell in love from there. Since, I’ve learned C/C++, Java, Python, HTML/CSS, et cetera. But my favorite language remains C++!
I’m a professional developer but I started out as a hobbyist. I fell in love with programming after seeing all the neat things you could do with jailbroken iPhone back in the day, and while I don’t dabble in that area, I love having the ability to customize or alter something to suit my needs.
My current work is pretty boring and repetitive, so I’ve found some energy to write a workout routine newsletter, like their weren’t enough workout apps already haha. I also started a terminal SQL application that could be used for querying files. (insert into orangefiles.csv select Path, Name, FileSize from [./…/dir] where Name like ‘%orange%’ and Type = ‘file’) But I gave up on that because it was way over my head. Might pick it up again a few years in the future, it would be pretty handy.
I have been a professional software developer/engineer for since 2010. I have worked in a few different industries, in a variety of programming languages and have done work concentrating on both front end and back end.
Right now, I am working for a large company and helping build their commercial web offering.
Professional on a haitus here. Fully self taught, done a ton of hobby projects, most of my fleshed out ones being in either C89 or C99. Most recently has been a calculator application for myself in X11 too brush off the rust on my X11 knowledge, as well as a Lemmy client library for C.
What do you call someone who doesn’t call themselves a programmer in any capacity but has enough programming skills to make things work when he needs things working for non-programming-focused things like automation for material science experiments?
I am that.
Professional FE engineer working in game dev.
Started out on Marapets with mostly HTML, learnt a bit of CSS when I got on Tumblr, then took a 3D modelling class in highschool. Decided I liked it, so I kept going and did a degree in game development & design. Joined a really small team at a consulting firm doing normal corporate contract stuff, where they trained me up across a few different languages, got me talking to clients, etc etc. Really, really good experience. During the pandemic, I left them (regretfully, but I needed to grow - they have my number, always) and did a year at a much larger company as a full-stack engineer with a focus on FE, and switched jobs when management grew toxic. Also did a lot of hobbyist CSS work on a writing site, got really damn good at it there.
Was going to join a design firm on their FE team, but a friend reached out and asked if I wanted to work in game dev instead. So… there was barely even a question there. I fucking love my job.
