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.

Pro and hobbyist. I started by learning Basic back in the late 1970’s. Got a EE with strong emphasis on Analog and DSP. Did analog for test and measurement systems but had to add microprocessors (and EPROMs and RAM) to build the systems that control the analog. For embedded I learned C. For PCs I did Basic, Forth (ugh), Turbo Pascal, Delphi, then C#. I’m heavy into unit testing. I did web development as well, back in 1997 to maybe 2010. Perl, PHP, MySQL, Linux, then Drupal. A lifetime ago.
I can’t tell what I’m working on now (professionally) but hobby-wise I do a lot of arduino stuff and some of it has been a blast. I did an automatic dog food dispenser a few years back that was an amazing tour of engineering your way out of failure. The look on my dogs face when the MK1 version sent a fire-hose stream of dog food across the room was awesome.

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’m old (a few years shy of 50), and a second generation professional programmer. E.g.: when I was in kindergarten, my father’s main job was maintaining the COBOL compiler on a particular series of Sperry-Univac mainframes. I grew up in a house where the scratch paper for grocery lists was punchcards because my dad brought home reams of unused ones when they were being thrown out in the early 80s. (Fun fact: with a sharp pencil, it’s totally possible to fit a full D&D character sheet on the back of an unused punchcard)

So for “how did I get started”, I was born into it; I was of the age when you’d get magazines in the mail with code to type in (later, the magazines came with audio cassettes with programs on them). So BASIC initially, then in high school my dad got us a copy of Turbo Pascal and set me loose on that. (Plus tiny TSRs in x86 assembly)

I had a few mid- and upper-level programming classes in undergrad., but was a pure math major, not CS. (so didn’t get any CS theory classes, though I did have a job working for campus networking people) After grad school, I got a job writing code in java and perl for a company you’ve never heard of unless you were in a particular corner of the finance world in the late 90s/early 2000s. I’m now on my third or fourth employer, depending on whether you count a buyout that kept the team intact but moved offices as a change in employer.

My day-to-day coding these days is primarily in python and C++, but in the past six months it’s also included work haskell and go, not to mention sh scripts and the weird groovy dialect used in Jenkins.

Oddly enough, my hobbyist stuff these days has all been HTML+javascript because it just makes simple GUI demos so easy. It’s kind of wild coming from the mid-90s when I was heavily involved in early web stuff at my undergrad school to this new world where javascript mostly works and is a basically sensible language. Recent-ish projects have included a solver for the NYTimes “digits” game, a Mandlebrot set viewer and the “come back for more meeting” timer at breakmessage.com.

Ive been learning for a year. I just want to get change careers because ive hit a cap in my earnings in my current one. The past year has been doing a bunch of fun python projects and javascript, and soaking in as much as I can.

Currently, working on codelabs and learning jetpack compose with Kotlin. It has been very fun learning this and a week in.

i gotta get out of this call center, but im ignoreing all the noise and following what makes me excited to learn, and right now thats android development lol.

Current title is “data architect”, but titles are meaningless. I sorta do whatever needs doing. Usually that means working with large databases and fixing performance issues. Right now I’m mostly focused on a distributed postgres database cluster using Citus (~5TB of data). Working with the data is fun, dealing with so many ingestion pipelines is annoying though.

Got my start in Jr High doing a bunch of web dev. Took a class called “computer math” in high school which was really just C and C++ programming (little bit of java). Did a comp sci degree in college. Pretty standard route I guess. Early in my career I discovered that I understand data better than most people for some reason (yay autism I guess). So I get focused on database problems and teaching people how to make data models that are usable and query-able and index-able.

I’m a professional C++ developer. I started with a Visual Basic intro to programming class my freshman year of high school, took a few more of those, then went to college for computer engineering.

Now I work on embedded boiler controls.

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 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, 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 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’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 already enough workout apps 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%’) But I gave up on that because it was way over my head, might pick it up again a few years in the future…

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.

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.