What started you in coding?

N

Nate

Senior Member
Everyone has that one particular memory where they didn't know anything about programming, but it inspired them to learn it or explore it..

My 'catalyst' was when I played Pokemon red as a child and was fascinated by the depth of the game squeezed into such a small cartridge. I then acquired Macromedia Flash and taught myself ActionScript through trial and error. I wanted to make a tile based game like that.. to this day I never have though haha. 

Im curious to hear what started other coders paths down the coding alley?

 
Neopets! And Pokemon sort of. I actually never really got into customizing my profile, but I wanted to make a website for my Pokemon Guild on Neopets, so I set up a Geocities site. Then, even after I quit Neopets, I kept going and continued to run my Pokemon Guild's website as a generic Pokemon fansite. And I did this for like 7 years from late elementary school through high school haha. I would just keep making random changes to my Pokemon site, make new versions of my website and so on, and learn stuff so I could add new features. XD

 
tiff said:
Neopets! And Pokemon sort of.
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This was it for me. I started with Neopets and their Guilds adding cool stuff. It grew from there from a web perspective. Although I had already become interested and had already been fiddling with the linux kernel and stuff way before that.

 
Haha I had a similar fascination with Pokemon Blue. I never really got anywhere with it, though.

I also really liked hacking just for the fun of it, not because I wanted to 'cheat' and win. I just liked messing with the games. 

I didn't start actually learning code until I started my SIM game. Am really passionate about making it. 

 
It seems a lot of people had their beginnings in HTML :-)

Can honestly say I never really did the neopets guilds stuff :-(

 
Digital said:
I think a lot of it has to do with HTML being very easily accessible and relatively easy to pick up with a lot of resources to learn it.
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Yup! I remember being 11 and feeling like knowing HTML was the coolest thing ever haha. It was easy, but also fun to like figure out how to make basic web pages!

Then from HTML, it's not too far of a step to start using basic PHP (I first used PHP so that I could use the include function to prevent myself from having to copy and paste my website layout everywhere haha). Or maybe you end using learning JavaScript as you try to figure out how to spice up your web pages some. Then from there, you eventually realize a lot of other programming languages kinda look like those languages, so other languages don't look so scary anymore. And things can just keep going from there~  :D

 
Digital said:
I think a lot of it has to do with HTML being very easily accessible and relatively easy to pick up with a lot of resources to learn it.
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Haha yeah! Starting a couple of weeks ago, I showed my 10 year old daughter the basics of HTML, and then pointed her to a few resources online on the topic. She disappeared to her bedroom for a few hours with her laptop, then re-appeared and had created a pokemon website, it's adorable!

I couldn't resist but to upload it to the internet - completely unmodified: http://nate.tube/sophie/Homepage.html

Once she gets to grips with it I'll start teaching her some of the do's and dont's (eg, not using a table for the layout etc). But for now, for her first attempt, I'm extremely proud of her :)

PS. Made it easier for her by letting her use Dreamweaver, rather than classic notepad haha :P

 
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Nate said:
PS. Made it easier for her by letting her use Dreamweaver, rather than classic notepad haha :P
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I started with FrontPage, so don't feel bad letting her start with Dreamweaver. We all start with tools that make it easy to start with, overtime she will find she will want to do more then she can do out of the box, and it will encourage growth.

Great first site though!

 
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