Recently Usborne books made their beautifully illustrated 1980’s computing books for kids available for download. It turns out several of my friends and Twitter acquaintances picked up their love of coding from these books as youngsters, myself included.

I owe my career to these books. I first learned BASIC from this one back in 1993: https://t.co/a9SwJxLTrc https://t.co/cdinNZi47j

— Nick Lockwood (@nicklockwood) February 7, 2016

I remember being in a dentist’s waiting room where an old battered copy of “Computer Space Games” lay on the bookshelf. I was so engrossed they actually let me take that book home, and thus began my journey.

Flicking through these old computing books had me inadvertently taking a trip down memory lane. I didn’t have a computer for some time after I started “coding” (writing down programs in BBC Basic) but that just made it all the more enticing as one day I’d be able to see these programs crash run for real. The problem I had with my BBC Basic skills was that the BBC Micro was already a relic when I was a young teen, however I did eventually get an Amiga 600 on which I learned the programming language Amiga E (closely related to C). Later getting a Gateway PC which had Windows 95, a Cyrix 5×86 CPU (Intel was expensive!), a 56k modem, CD-Rom, VGA graphics card and a bucket load of power.

In those days kids like me hung around IRC, where after dinner I’d spend time chatting with quite a few “leet d00dz”. In these circles I came across a fantastic range of things: from mIRC-script and Sub7, to SoftIce and assembly language (ASM). ASM is something I would prompt any young coder to at least get some experience with. It may be all but useless these days, with even the most throw-away chips happily run the voluminous instructions output by much higher-level languages. The main thing you learn from ASM is the fundamentals of how a computer’s brain takes your instructions and uses a much more limited set of constructs and variables (registers) to do anything. Ultimately as a kid this was the thing that sold me on computers, they can do anything and all you needed was your brain and some time to create that anything.

Coding through necessity

When I was 15 or 16 we still used dialup modems to access the net. I think it cost something like 2p (£0.02 GBP) a minute to dial up, and during that time no-one could use the phone. It also made a racket so there was no sneaking online. We didn’t have a lot of money, so my internet time was limited to 30 minutes a day. So like a boy scout, in order to learn you had to be prepared. I ended up writing a Visual Basic app to spider and scrape sites, saving the pages to disk. This way I could dial up, have it scrape a bunch of sites to 3 levels deep and disconnect, reading at my leisure.

In chemistry class we were given homework of balancing symbol equations, hundreds of these things to work through. They aren’t hard, really it’s just just grunt work to apply some basic rules. As I later found out, it’s a core tenet of a coder to be lazy and never to repeat the same task more than once. So I wrote another little VB app which let you press buttons to input the elements, the numbers of units e.g. O² and hit go. I sold this program on floppy disk for £1 a pop to classmates, and the homework problem was solved.

With hindsight the above are early examples of situations where coding solved a real world problem for me personally, and I suspect that might be the case for a few of you reading. I also wonder if the huge amount and instant availability of free content gets in the way of this desire to create, but I like to think that this desire is universal.

Finding the “right” language?

At school we learned Pascal (and Delphi), a little Prolog, and for a final project we had an open choice (I opted for Visual C++ with MFC and Crystal Reports, so practical). We were also taught to finger trace which I believe helps to minimise common typos in later years. From there I started to do “real work” with ActionScript (for my sins, 10 years as a Flash developer), JavaScript (web and later nodejs), some Coldfusion and ASP.NET, some iOS projects in Objective-C and for the large part my days have been spent in Java (Android) in recent years. If you’re familiar with the 99 Bottles of Beer website you’ll know there are hundreds and hundreds of programming languages. The other day I was wondering whether those 10 years of Flash and Flex and the vast amounts of time, perhaps some 5000 hours, learning the ins and outs of a huge enterprise SDK was time that has been quite simply, lost. The thing I have learned though is that it doesn’t really matter what languages you’ve touched on over the years, it’s never a step backwards. ActionScript was based on ECMAScript 262 (as is JavaScript) and eventually evolved into something like Harmony-meets-Java. The thing is I learned from this was how to use a dynamically typed language, how to architect apps with (Pure)MVC, how to write testable code. It’s almost never time lost, well, maybe there are some exceptions.

Who know’s what comes next? What I know for sure is that this is not the end of my journey, something new will come along and it’ll be time to start again, leaning on previous experience but not being blinkered by it.

That was my story in a nutshell and time passed has me missing a lot out no doubt, but what did your journey look like? What were the key moments that made an impact on you, what you learned, and why?