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 tried to write a game. The game wasn’t fun, but programming kept mashing the “I created something” reward button in my head, so I kept doing it.
The fact that debug cycles are fast. I started out working in nanotechnology, and spending 3-4 days of fabrication -> electron microscope -> optical verification was soul crushing cause 99.9% of the work never led to anything and you practically never knew why.
Software development is logical and predictable. It’s (relatively) easy to break a large task down into small ones, prove to yourself that they will work, and compose them together to complete a large project. Sure, things go wrong here and there, but for the most part, you can be confident that whatever you’re doing should work every step of the way… without having to worry that you committed some irrecoverable error at any step in the process.
The worst teacher I ever had assigned me a project to make a game using GameMaker. Been hooked ever since, and eventually turned it into a career.
I wanted to make videogames. I made videogames on my graphing calculator between classes.
Working through the logic is fun
