How I Became a Programmer, Part 2 – The Lost Years.

In a previous post, I talked about my early experiences with computers and programming.

For the first few years after high school, I did not really make any progress with my programming skills. I flopped around in school part-time vaguely pursuing a degree in art and illustration while working an assortment of terrible jobs before I ending up working in a bookstore. If you are interested in the world and curious about the stuff in it, I recommend spending a few years working in a bookstore or a library. You will learn a lot of things, especially how terrible and ignorant the mass of humanity can be. Most bookstores have a lending policy, so you can read whatever you want for free as long as you return it in sellable condition, and I read all kinds of books. At this point in my life I was burning through like two or three books a week. Long commutes by subway do have this small advantage. I read lot of science fiction and fantasy, history, popular science books, and the occasional computer book.

The bookstore I worked at was in in a mall that happened to be right next to a very large software company. Consequently, the store had a very large computer book section. Around this time, the Internet was starting to actually be a thing that real people used and I loved every second I managed to get online at the blistering speed of 36.6k baud. We had twenty feet of wall covered with computer books on everything from Cold Fusion to J++. I read some HTML books, and did some dabbling in Visual Basic and C, using the compilers and software that were on CDs in the back of those books.

I have always been the go-to computer guy for family and friends. I am good at setting computers up and fixing them when things go wrong. One time I saved my sister’s unsaved term paper after a power failure by pulling most of the text from a Microsoft word temp file. I really like computers. I didn’t really pursue tech as a career because I wanted to do other things. I wanted to be an artist or a writer or a musician, but none of those really panned out.

Fast forward a few years, and I left a trail of closed bookstores in my wake. The art career never really took off. It was a fun side hobby that occasionally brought in a few bucks, with some of my art occasionally appearing online and in print books,  but never anything close to live on. I was running a Waldenbooks in a mall, and I decided that I needed to change my life up. I took off across the state and went back to school to study psychology (another subject I am really interested in) full time. I did a semester and was the loneliest I have ever been, and I ended back home and working in yet another bookstore. Sigh.

Somewhere in this time frame, I picked up Beginning C++ Game Programming. I spent a few weeks going though this book, and it reminded me of how much I loved programming back on the Apple IIe in the high school library. It really helped solidify a lot of computer programming concepts that I had touched before in C, like pointers, and introduced me to things like encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism, and just why you might want to bother with an object-oriented approach to programming. There is a newer version of this book, and it may not be the best first programming book, it certainly re-lit my interest in programming.

 

At the small independent bookstore I was working at, I ended up running the website. It was a Network Solutions eCommerce site, and it was all setup when I inherited it. I worked on it quite a bit, tweaking the design, adding some javascript bits, and learning a lot as I went along.

At this point, I decided I needed to go back to school (again!), and this time I would study Computer Science. I signed up for a night class at a community college, and I will continue my story in How I Became A Programmer, Part 3 – Just Getting Started.