Room 13

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Today after watching Uri Lavi and Ade Oshineye's informal talk at GDD11 event in Tel-Aviv, i've thought that it is an incredible idea if people from the community will share a post about how they started out their journey. What made them choose this path, what helped them, what excited them and what didn't.

In this post I'm going to write about few situations that i faced through my journey and what i learned from them.

I read quite a few posts on how people got into programming and many start with "My father brough a PDP from work...", well my Mother holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and back at the day she worked in a nearby college as an operator, but "In Soviet Russia you don't bring a computer home, you bring yourself to a computer" because they were freaking huge even at the late 80's. In fact the first computer that we got was Pentium 500Mhz in year 2000. Neverless, the view of wardrobe sized computers and a room filled with terminals ignited my interest.

You don't need a computer to program, but a good imagination. For years i was writing and running snippets in my head and tried them on a computer when i had a chance. Being able to code anywhere is a good training for your mind.

 

I learnt actual programming at 6th grade. My computers teacher Sergei Lukin(who had a huge impact on me) at that time was writing a book called "Turbo Pascal 7.0 a guide for beginners" and he happily agreed to teach me and few other students the basics of programming. We were meeting after school hours at the computer lab and learning using the draft of his book, doing all excercise and getting helpful tips from him, the group quickly reduced to 2 people, but he still kept spending time with us at the evening for what i'm very thankful.

This experience taught me that there's always people who are willing to share and spend their time to help you increase your knowledge. If you can't find one then you're not looking hard enough.

When I was 14 I've spent almost a year in Mumbay with my father who had some business there. I went to a "IT college" to study C/C++ and that was the first time I faced the realities of software industry. People that I met there didn't care about the craft and didn't find it exciting at all, they took 24 different courses starting from C and ending with sql and had skills of below avarage in each of the subjects they learnt. As a kid i never thought of this craft as a source of income and this experience shocked me and still does.

There's a lot of programmers in the world, even more than we need, but there's not a lot good programmers. You can't get good at something without being passionate about it.

 

 

At one point i got into MUDs and decided to figure out how they work. I got my hands on a code base called CircleMUD that was written by Jeremy Elson. My mind was blown off. I hacked through it for a few weeks modifying and adding new functionality which was extremely fun. I ended up borrowing some coding style and loads of new useful techniques that I still apply in my code.

Reading other peoples code will greatly improve your skills especially if the person who wrote it is much more experienced than you. Reading advanced code could be very difficult, but the benefits of not giving up to understand it are worth any time that you will spend.

When I got an internet connection at home I naturally decided to use it to improve my programming skills. The problem was that at that time there weren't many resources in Hebrew or Russian that you could find about the topic so i was forced to read material in english which i knew on a very basic level. The solution came from Freenode irc where I stumbled on a room with guys from around the globe who were as excited about programming as mee and didn't mind my broken english. In a very short time my english and programming skills were greatly improved.

Find a group of likeminded people who share your passion and dive right in. Don't be afraid if their skills are surpassing yours, because frequent communication and involvement will quickly bring you to their level.

 

 

I went through a long road before turning my hobby into a proffession, and even now i'm still excited about it. The above list is incomplete and there's much more lessons that i learnt through the years, but this post is already to long and i'll leave it for some other time or you always can contact me on twitter or in person.