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 ?
When I first got daily access to internet (back in 2009), I got curious about how programs are built. Like, if I wanted to make my own application, what should I do?
I googled something along that direction and it linked me to a famous french website for learning programming (site du zéro) where I learnt C language.
After the course I made a 2D Snake game with SDL2. How naive was I to think I could write it in one go without testing anything in between! I scrapped the 1st attempt because it was a disaster and randomly inserting/removing
*was not helping.I started again from scratch, testing in smaller steps, and I really liked it. After a couple of weeks I had my Snake game working! I was so proud of it that I showed it to my mom. I do not have the source files anymore but I still have the binary somewhere
Afterwards I sticked with it and continued programming - I was back in school without much access to internet so I programmed on my TI-83+ instead. Eventually I pursued computer science studies then a PhD… It got me hooked real good.
similar story here, just that little me wrote his snake program with windows forms because that was all I knew. Every element of the game was a button. I remember the first versions beeing so inefficient (rebuilding the whole UI that was made of loads of small buttons every few milliseconds) that my Intel core 2 duo couldn't run it properly. Good times.