I started coding at about 8-ish. QBasic, DOS, other basic stuff. My mom contemplated changing her career from marketing to programming and took some courses, but she had a completely different mindset — so in middle school I ended up helping her with Perl and C++. While Perl was just an ordinary syntax hell (especially after Visual Basic for me), C++ was a completely different beast. My mom was trying to understand every line that she was writing and do everything "the right way", but courses that she was taking didn't employ the best of teachers. They heavily relied on some magic code and "we always do it this way" explanations, so I had to figure out a lot of stuff on my own — it was actually pretty frustrating and confusing. I fear (often implicit) complexity of C++ to this day, and prefer to use something more "simple" and "safe" whenever possible. Around this time we also got Knuth books around the house, and I spent a lot of time trying to understand them. I don't think that I got much, but a lot of it stuff really stuck.
I successfully applied to a math-specialized high school (remnant of soviet special school system, was rated the best in the city and one of the best in the country at the time). The main thing that I learnt in three years there was that I was not, in fact, really smart — not compared to my classmates, anyway. Definitely not smart enough to be a mathematician. I did MIX emulator as a summer project in Delphi, but afterwards decided not to pursue a programming career, and go into bioengineering/bioinformatics instead.
Fast-forward 8 years. I dropped out of university (apparently, being math/physics geek with no interest in general biology isn't the best background to go into biological field) and became a game designer. Applied for a job, passed the interview and then made a career of constructing virtual worlds, later — social & mobile games with free2play monetization. I worked on some management, producer positions, and even started & failed my own offer-based monetization business in the process. But after a few dozens failed projects (fail rate is pretty high in gaming industry, but especially in this part of it) I kinda burned out and decided to change it again. I never stopped programming, and was following and fooling around with Unity3d engine since 2.6, so it wasn't hard to pass a coding interview in the same company I've been working on before. And here I am — coding for a living in the first time in my life for the last three months.
There's a lot to being a software engineer that programmers don't appreciate enough. I'm only responsible for whatever I myself do and have power over. I have clear goals & tasks. Arguments that I have are a lot more objective and much more rarely rely on "feelings" and estimates. I don't necessarily want to stay a programmer forever, but I learn a lot and I'm much more happier then before. And finally, I'm really surprised of how much I'm worth on the job market — being a software engineer almost feels like some kind of easy cheat code in life for a person with my mindset.
I successfully applied to a math-specialized high school (remnant of soviet special school system, was rated the best in the city and one of the best in the country at the time). The main thing that I learnt in three years there was that I was not, in fact, really smart — not compared to my classmates, anyway. Definitely not smart enough to be a mathematician. I did MIX emulator as a summer project in Delphi, but afterwards decided not to pursue a programming career, and go into bioengineering/bioinformatics instead.
Fast-forward 8 years. I dropped out of university (apparently, being math/physics geek with no interest in general biology isn't the best background to go into biological field) and became a game designer. Applied for a job, passed the interview and then made a career of constructing virtual worlds, later — social & mobile games with free2play monetization. I worked on some management, producer positions, and even started & failed my own offer-based monetization business in the process. But after a few dozens failed projects (fail rate is pretty high in gaming industry, but especially in this part of it) I kinda burned out and decided to change it again. I never stopped programming, and was following and fooling around with Unity3d engine since 2.6, so it wasn't hard to pass a coding interview in the same company I've been working on before. And here I am — coding for a living in the first time in my life for the last three months.
There's a lot to being a software engineer that programmers don't appreciate enough. I'm only responsible for whatever I myself do and have power over. I have clear goals & tasks. Arguments that I have are a lot more objective and much more rarely rely on "feelings" and estimates. I don't necessarily want to stay a programmer forever, but I learn a lot and I'm much more happier then before. And finally, I'm really surprised of how much I'm worth on the job market — being a software engineer almost feels like some kind of easy cheat code in life for a person with my mindset.