Why I Am a Programmer (alfie.wtf)

254 pointsby jruohonen17 hours ago79 comments

chr15m 13 hours ago

Conan the Barbarian and Below the Root on our Apple IIe. Tiny worlds behind the glowing Orange CRT. How do I make something like this? My mum (lol) helped me figure out how to get keyboard input in BASIC. I made a little game where an O character chases your X character around the screen. Core game loop. Browsing pirate CGA games at the warung in Pondok Indah, well outside the jurisdiction of US law. Glorious rack upon rack of tiny worlds to explore. Death Track and Prince of Persia. More BASIC and that gorilla throwing bananas. Later on the Multiline BBS. Talking late into the night with tech weirdos twice my age. All manner of mind bending ideas. Newsgroups. Punks and skaters and cypherpunks. Predicting what was coming, seeing the future we expected unfolding. Downloading Commander Keen over FTP. WinSock and Netscape. My first homepage. Downloading Linux and getting it running. Configuring XFree86 modelines all night lol. Turbo Pascal and VAX VMS at uni. My first job coding. Hacking out web backends in gnarly ass Perl. No databases just blatting and slurping comma delimited text files lol. Getting paid to do the most exciting thing there was to do, all day. Magic.

sirsinsalot 13 hours ago

That sounds like my childhood and teen years. It feels so far away culturally. I miss the sub culture and counter culture.

jacquesm 11 hours ago

It's not coming back either.

At the same time: a Raspberry Pi 2 W has more CPU power than all of the machines that I had between 1980 and 1991. The experience is still there. But it is very difficult to take a child from say 'Minecraft' to a blinking cursor on the screen and get them to be interested.

Imustaskforhelp an hour ago

For what its worth, I might be one of the younger folks on the site (currently 18)

I am still glad that children are playing Minecraft. One of the first things that I am really proud of what I did was somehow breaking a nat of an intel tiber (free) vps just so that I can create a minecraft server.

My first thing that I built myself in mc that I still remember is having a piston push a redstone block which pushes another piston and a redstone block (quite complicated overengineering) to basically create a clock to spawn many mobs. I am still proud of it and my brother showed me minecraft and I remember the first time he showed me and I was in awe!

one of the first blogs (or second I think) that I made was about how to self host minecraft using a different technique (there is a plugin)

There are lots of coding/server related things to Minecraft. I think many people got into coding just as much because of minecraft and got into servers because of minecraft server hosting. (It's really popular)

I sometimes get recommended Minecraft Nostalgia videos and man the nostalgia hits so hard.

I understand what you are saying but Minecraft at its core is a simple blocky game that I played with friends.

Yes, It might be hard to care about pixels but also not so much. I still play chess and I can play it on a pixelated screen just as much as on chess.com or lichess.org

One of the first games that I played was pokemon yellow (the OG one), I pirated it and that introduced to the piracy and oh boy, I genuinely believe that it was the reason why I got tech savvy and am learning CS within uni as I did that within 2nd grade.

I have played pokemon yellow, pokemon crystal and all the pixelated games. I love them all and cherish them with nostalgia.

I am more worried about the shorts and reels.

Some comments and stuff that I wrote about similar things:

[An advice for a 15 year old on HN to play minecraft instead of hyperoptimizing for business]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341430

[My pokemon yellow piracy complete story]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47663383

Self Hosting Vanilla Minecraft server has never been this easy before (GUI Right in minecraft , while being open source !): https://trulyfoss.mataroa.blog/blog/self-hosting-vanilla-min...

saulpw 11 hours ago

I just produced a restoration/translation of Below The Root last month! Check it out, hope it brings back some memories: https://root.saul.pw.

thenipper 11 hours ago

I had a pirated copy of Below The Root as a kid on my Apple IIc... except the small town copy network had made a bad copy. So it'd only play some of the time if i was lucky. I'm going to dive into this

dustfinger 11 hours ago

I grew up with an Aplle IIc and I loved Conan the Barbarian. A neighbor made me a copy and I used to absolutely love playing that game. I remember there was a message on the screen when you died, and the one burnt in my mind is "The eyes have it". I also loved Prince of Persian for the 486. That one I actually beat. Your history is very similar to mine. Now, I have been coding for decades, but it all started on the Apple IIc.

chr15m 11 hours ago

Happy days. I think Prince of Persia is one of the only games I beat.

Did you ever play Another World by Erich Chahi? Still one of the greatest games and still good today.

dustfinger 11 hours ago

Oh hell yeah. My neighbor had that for his commodore 64. I never owned that one, but I was blown away by its graphics and how smooth the animations were. I have not thought about that game in a really long time. Good times! I also loved text based adventures. Like probably lots of kids in the early 80s, one of the first ones I played was Adventure. I also loved The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Infocom was awesome. I have been playing through the zork series with my 14 year old recently.

One other game I absolutely loved for the Apple II was Captain Goodnight. I got really far into that game, but I don't think I ever beat it.

tosapple 10 hours ago

buck rodgers on c64

esafak 10 hours ago

I've never heard it mentioned, but I think Another World was visually influenced by another French project, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartakus_and_the_Sun_Beneath_...

chr15m 2 hours ago

Wow cool!

reenorap 9 hours ago

Below the Root was a fantastic game, I somehow stumbled upon that 40+ years ago on my PC and played it not understanding what the rules were. Now I’m going to have to look for it as abandonware.

clx75 14 minutes ago

Stamps Back - a documentary about the Hungarian warez scene of the 80s and 90s (with English subtitles):

https://youtu.be/YUqn1OPxtmE

christophilus 14 hours ago

For me, it was the creative, puzzle-solving, game-like nature of it. Then I got my first job, and I had 100% autonomy, so a friend of mine and I got to solve real problems for real people in the real world. It was a rush. Making people’s lives better through software is still the biggest motivation for me.

cmrx64 13 hours ago

(btw what ended up being the resolution of your great grandfather’s ring? I was flipping through your history to see what you work on :)

sevenzero 4 hours ago

And the creative, puzzle solving, game like nature of it is now completely gone. Answering architectural questions isn't fun to me. I loved the process of writing code and now I hate being a software developer.

toxik 3 hours ago

All of it is still important, but you don't _have_ to do it. The LLM will infill a generic solution that looks about as good as AI art. It will have bugs down the line as important levels of encapsulation were not observed, state was not thought about or formalized, and global data dependencies are implicited all over the place.

sevenzero 3 hours ago

That might be true for your stack but I am employed as a Laravel Web Developer and AI can code faster and better than me. Honestly, I have no idea how I am still employed.

I did start learning Rust recently, without using AI at all, and the process of coding is very fun. But I can't help but feel like the farmer who refused to use tractors...

Personally I just wait to be laid off, so I am forced to change things.

vconnor an hour ago

I loved becoming fluent in the language of logic to tell magic rocks to do my bidding.

Making people’s lives better was always an incidental benefit, but also I learned pretty soon that the only life I was improving was my boss’ and the company revenue sheet. I don’t delude myself anymore that I am making the world a better place, and in any case I would enjoy talking to computers even if it was a completely useless activity.

SA9G 8 hours ago

Getting to build things without skinned knuckles or solder smoke in your face... now that is a rush! And if you are not happy with it, you get to tear it down and build it back up better. It costs nothing but your time and imagination. Importantly, you get to build, to solve problems, to engineer, to visualize, to create and be creative. (Ok, maybe musicians have even more fun, but alas I wasn't wired for music. :-)

rjh29 3 hours ago

This is it for me. I like creating, but making physical objects involves a lot of expense buying the right tools and materials, and making a mistake is costly. I make a lot of mistakes, so programming is perfect.

fmpfmp 2 hours ago

I studied mechanical engineering and your comment explains perfectly why I gravitated towards coding during my univeristy years.

All it takes to produce is time and a macbook and there are no limits to your imagination and creativity.

cristaloleg 4 hours ago

Reminds me the Hacker's Manifesto https://phrack.org/issues/7/hackers-manifesto

bitwize 3 hours ago

That's not cool, it's commie bullshit!

hefner1456 an hour ago

Sounds more like Anti-authoritarianism, but really it sounds like a frustrated young person that doesnt fit in and just wants to be themselves and is smart enough to recognize the hypocrisy around them. Being told your bad by bad people in incedibly frustrating when your young.

Krei-se 14 hours ago

I started programming on my schools CASIO Graphics Calculator.

It was slow but allowed some text based games we then shared. No internet so did it all from trial and error.

Then ... i wanted a 3D Cube rotating. At 15/16 this was a bit too much i guess i had no idea about rotation matrices back then and deemed myself a bit dense.

Never got around doing 3D stuff at work, only databases all the time. I dabbled some with ThreeJS but i guess i was still haunted.

BUT THEN. Geometric algebra! So smooth. If you like tables and had problems with stuff like cross products or quaternions, didnt like copy pasting rotation matrices, etc. YOU WILL LOVE geometric algebra! It's like you meet 2 tables on a FK and bam its a volume (highly simplified!!)

Just my 2 cents. Don't write yourself off if you did not do 1337 demos in primary school on a tamagotchi.

gnabgib 17 hours ago

(2015) Even links to the HN discussion at the time (89 points, 59 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8837545

1n3nt0r 12 hours ago

I took a course at a college in '79 using fortran on a mainframe (though I was just in middle school at the time). I can't say I understood all of the incantations required (IBM had JCL), but realized it was "magical" and wanted to be part of this tribe.

I saved up to buy a VIC-20 (a 4K computer) and later a C64, writing games for both. Those were magical days I will look back to fondly. That sparkle has not left, though I sometimes miss the purity of near-bare-metal systems of yesteryear.

Like some in my generation, I lived through and contributed to some of the early phases of computing, pre-internet, and am altogether grateful for it.

ifh-hn 14 hours ago

I don't consider myself a programmer, I started programming in my late 30s after I got my first office job. I learned it to automate all the bullshit I needed to do.

Wish now I'd started earlier. It's like having a special power if your actual job isn't programming. I like getting the computer to do my job for me.

dicroce 12 hours ago

Denthor got me into programming too.... Learned a TON from him and started to actually get real cool things working... I even contacted him after I got my first job... Was a totally cool guy. I wonder what happened to him?

alfiedotwtf 11 hours ago

Someone (or maybe even him) replied to my original post to HN

burnedbyhell 13 hours ago

I started on a Ti-83 and better yet could take other programs online and load them and then modify to my desire.

When the teacher said show your work I wrote out the program I made to calculate the equation. They banned calculators altogether.

Once there was a computer I traded sleep to stay on it. I worked professionally for almost 3 decades and it ultimately cost me my health and mental health. It was often my own insecurities and anxiety that led me up the ladder.

I left the field and went to work for something I believe in and my tech skills are like wizardry to these folks.

There is a lot of blue sky to explore for people in tech.

anon7725 13 hours ago

What field did you go into?

burnedbyhell 11 hours ago

Got into tech from help desk (to be fair it was partially supporting UUNET and Usenet so it wasn't a clueless end user all the time), all the way to top level engineer doing devops type work.

Left to work in the arts.

zabriel_goss 10 hours ago

Say more! Fine arts? Music? Theater? Non-profit? Commercial?

josh-sematic 12 hours ago

TI-83 was also my gateway drug into programming. Good memories!

jamesfinlayson 9 hours ago

TI-84+ for me, though I think it was fairly similar to the TI-83.

wpm 11 hours ago

I lost the TI-83 I used in high school after a physics final during my first year at university, and with it, all of the programs I had written on there. There are two data loss incidents that make me wince, and that is one of them. Not because they were great. They sucked. All in TI-BASIC, I was too stoned to wonder "how do the games I installed get away with not being all in TI-BASIC it would be too much to write" and get pointed towards learning assembly at a much younger age than I did, but still, they were Genesis, Book I for me.

whizzter 15 hours ago

Lovely, I remember the first cracktro that blew my mind long before I actually got in touch with the demoscene.

It was an ACE cracktro for International Karate that was putting huge things in the borders, something about it stuck to my mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ODIb5r_fS8

throw-qqqqq 13 hours ago

Nice “chiptune version” of Das Model by Kraftwerk!

TrackerFF 11 hours ago

I didn't really get into coding before HS. By chance we had this elective class called "Java Programming", where the teacher showed us a bunch of applets which piqued my interest.

Our very first "real" program was some local network chat system, which I found extremely fascinating - because I had suddenly gone from writing a bunch of terminal/CLI programs which felt a bit...boring, to writing something which felt like "proper" software.

aidotguru 4 hours ago

I once like to be a programmer then AI era hit hard, now i am thinking to be a farmer like my grandfather

hotelsacher an hour ago

You can still be a programmer. Ignoring all the stupid "why don't you use AI" questions makes you even more of a bad-ass.

kkotak 14 hours ago

Beautifully written! Thanks for sharing. I share a lot the emotional journey you described in my youth and also why I chose to be a programmer. The world felt so small during that time and something you could wrap your arms around and the community was your family. I don't know how the pre-teens of today percieve computing and technology, but I'd venture it's very different. Hope, though, that they feel the same rush with opportunities with AI that we felt with computing and the nascent connectivity of our times.

alfiedotwtf 12 hours ago

I’m sad that today’s youth don’t have a chance to dabble and pull things apart like we did :(

latentsea 11 hours ago

They dabble in pulling apart culture.

roarcher 10 hours ago

As a kid in the 90s, the ultimate fate of all appliances and electronic devices in my house was to be disassembled and stripped by me, their components buried in deep drawers for use in some imagined future invention, and occasionally reincarnated in the form of some makeshift radio or blinking LED.

I remember visiting repair shops for our aging color TV with my dad and being awed by the tables and shelves full of exotic-looking vacuum tubes, exposed CRTs, and dangerous-looking coils, and what I imagined to be the sorcerer-like skills of the man behind the counter who could divine their inner workings.

On weekends I would cajole my parents to drive me to the numerous electronic surplus stores, where I would marvel at tallboy-sized capacitors, which my father wisely prohibited me from buying.

Radio Shack was in its prime with walls covered in DIP chips and those "Electronic Project Lab" kits, of which I aspired to own the 300-in-1 version for $65 with a real breadboard and digital ICs. I vividly remember the birthday when I finally received it. I could seldom get the more complicated digital designs to work, which I've since learned was likely because breadboards are terrible for digital logic, but I was nevertheless entertained for countless hours.

Those were some of the most formative experiences of my childhood, and I too feel sad that they're becoming a thing of the past. You can open a modern electronic device and there's hardly anything in there that you can disassemble and re-use. And even if you could, the magic doesn't live there. When I was a kid, everything a device did was physically manifested in the arrangement of its parts. Now it only exists in firmware, invisible and inaccessible to the curious eye.

I suppose every generation feels nostalgia for the lost world of its childhood. But like you, I can't help but feel sad that no more children will get to experience that.

ghoul2 an hour ago

I am a programmer cause thats what clicked in my head at 6-7 years old, with access to a ZX Spectrum and its manual. I didn't know one would eventually make a career of it.

Coding, computers, building whatever shit I wanted: that's the first thing that 'made sense' to me. And remained the only thing. What else am I gonna do?

wpm 11 hours ago

https://files.scene.org/browse/resources/docs/tutorials/dent...

Gonna take a look at the tutorial later this week, I always wanted a glimpse of how those demoscene folks did their magic.

kristianp 12 hours ago

I don't understand why HN chops off the leading "Why", it completely changes the intent of the title.

Edit: removing reference to the leading "How", that seems to be done editorially by the poster of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50227356

saidnooneever 7 hours ago

i like u somehow found some digital friends back then, carefully not to spill the beans to the wrong people. I never did until later computer shop opened and i bumped there into familiar face. together we put pocket money to little book about basic with floppy that included tools.

nice blog :) cracked loose some fond memories.

SeriousM 2 hours ago

25 years ago I figured out that building tools is what I love creating. And looking back, that's wat I really did well, for computers and for humans. About 20 years back I wished I could just express my way to build things and today it's possible! AI is just another tool to create toolings! Nice life!

snvzz 2 hours ago

One word: AMIGA.

crypto137 14 hours ago

I remember my first job out of uni, I had to convert what I thought was 2000 files from an old php site to gatsby. Mainly taking the page dump data and turning them into Yaml pages for static generation. It took me DAYS.

Last day, I realize it wasn't 2000. It was 8000, and there was not a snowballs chance in hell I could do the remaining 6000 in time for the deadline. So I went online, found pieces on stack overflow for this disgusting nodejs script that was 8 for loops deep, and then ran it against all the files. It took like.... a second, and all the files were just done. Poof, instant.

I got a job as a programmer and never looked back. The last ~decade has been a wild ride of highs and lows, but I still love doing it every day. There's just something deeply satisfying of taking an idea, and the computer just doing it.

jbloggs777 16 hours ago

We could have crossed paths back in the day. Those 25c unlimited local calls felt like such a steal.

marcus_holmes 11 hours ago

...and here I am, twenty years later, writing code! Every day I turn up to a standup meeting that goes on for 30 minutes, where I get to say "no blockers"! then I start on my JIRA tickets, and make the product that my company produces worse for our users in tiny increments. Honestly, the world would be a better place if I just did nothing, but I need the money and we get pipped if we don't complete enough tickets in a day.

In the evenings, after the kids go to sleep, I work on my side-project, an app that lets you preorder coffee from the local cafe so you don't have to wait so long. I've been working on it for six months and I dream of the day I can quit the day job and work on it full time.

alfiedotwtf 12 hours ago

OP here: I’m now spending more time in AI agents than in emacs these days, but I can honestly say that I’m having even more fun now given that I’m able to build things within days that would have taken me months!

… but don’t give me hate… I still code with my hands :)

monk_grilla 6 hours ago

Do you have any advice for loving the job as it is today?

I grew up programming and being obsessed with computers too, though in a very different world. I started working full time as a programmer this year and I haven't written a line of code. I just set the agent going and read reminiscent posts on HN like this about how great things used to be.

I feel like most of what I loved about programming has disappeared just as I truly began.

lukaslalinsky 5 hours ago

My biggest advice is to keep programming for fun. I don't know what do you do at work, but for me work was never the satisfying activity what I started programming for. Pretty much all the problems at work were obvious and just needed the code written. But outside of work, you get to experiment, you get to learn, solve challenges. I started programming because I was fascinated by how what we learn at math class (trigonometry) can be used to display things on the computer (old 8bit one). Then I rented all the books from the local library and studied, even though I didn't have a computer at home. And this kind of kept me going. I always had a personal project which can occupy my head, and in the past, when I got home, I could try to write the ideas into code. These days, I use the agents for the last step, but that step was never the fun part for me, it was the thinking and "connecting the dots".

alfiedotwtf 4 hours ago

Ever since I started dabbling as a kid, programming has been my hyperfocus, so it’s hard to give advice if you’re not coming from angle.

I also found that my brain has treated problem solving and building in general like gaming where every roadblock/problem/issue is like a level boss, and release to production is when you clock the game :)

So even if you’re spending 99% of your time in an agent cli rather than your editor, look at the problem you’re working on as a problem in itself and your task is to golf it - but as in one-shot prompts, but how can you do it to the best of your ability with sharp prompting.

But yeah, like a sibling comment said - keep it fun. I think if you get to serious then it takes the fun out of it… you’re no longer problem solving, you’re just stepping through the motions.

Oh… and also - treat everything like a learning experience and with the fascination like discovering Narnia... because If you’re not learning/growing/stressing even just a little in your current job, move on! You’re not doing yourself any favours staying stagnant… or maybe that’s terrible advice and I’m just addicted to constant fight-or-flight, high cortisol, and caffeine

XenophileJKO 4 hours ago

I think also as a kid who grew up with a C64.. part of the fun is keeping a little sense of wonder and really PUSH the tools, in this case the LLMs to their limit.

I think I always had fun learning all the little knobs that a programming language would give you and where they made solving problems easier or more elegant.

You can get the same joy from working with an LLM when you have things setup correctly for example and you can say "handle these boring tickets for me" and if just "works" and works well.