How I Got into Programming

I grew up in a small town in India in the early 90s where I literally had no idea what a computer was till I was ten years old. Only a few rich and/or specialized people in the whole country probably had access to personal computers. All the work in offices was done on paper, and most public schools (I went to one) didn’t have funds to have functioning toilets, let alone computers.

This all started to shift by the mid-nineties. I still vividly remember my first encounter with the word “Computer”. In my fifth grade, some textbook had a chapter on computers, and that was the first time I learned about a machine that could be programmed. Soon after, our school got a few old computers—I’m not sure which make or model—that they started letting the children use. I remember typing my name on the keyboard and be thrilled when the letters showed up on the black-and-white terminal. After that there was no stopping me.

My school started offering computer classes after a few years, and I very enthusiastically joined one. However, it got boring pretty soon because these classes didn’t teach any real programming. We did learn some variant of BASIC, but we wrote all our programs on paper. And on the “Computer day” we got to type our names in Microsoft Word and style it in different ways. I quickly ended up hating it, and gave up on programming.

Fortunately, my sister didn’t go to a public school and they had better curriculum for computer classes. They were taught how to make websites using HTML. This was before modern CSS, when everything was styled using the <font> and <b> tags. Being able to make something of my own by typing some text into Notepad was amazing! I was hooked.

I ended up reading my sister’s HTML books at home, and secretly trying it out on my school computers after quickly making those PPTs they wanted us to make. Just type some tags and text in Notepad, open the HTML file in Internet Explorer, and boom!, you have a working website.

In late 2001, my father bought me a personal computer after a lot of begging. The PCs were very expensive back then in India (or maybe we were comparatively poor), and he had to take a loan from the bank, which took him six years to repay. It was a turning point for me. Now I could do programming for longer periods of time, with no teacher looking over my shoulder. It was then when I learned my first programming language: JavaScript.

JavaScript, or DHTML as they used to call it back then, was a natural progression for someone wanting to make websites. I spent hours making these little interactive websites and small games in JavaScript. I had no idea what other programming languages existed and I was fine with it.

Eventually, I graduated from school and I went to college and learned C and Java, Python and Perl. I spent a lot of time programming on my own PC during the college. I couldn’t take a computer science major, so I had to teach myself programming (and CS) by reading books and stuff from Internet. One of the earliest book I read was “Learning Perl” by Randal L. Schwartz, which I still consider one of the best written programming books. I ended up loving Perl more each day, and for a while I was doing all my programming in it. That gave me a lucky break when a company came looking for interns at my college.

The company was specifically looking for a Perl programmer to automate some of their testing systems. And by some bizarre twist of fate, I was literally the only one that applied. So they hired me. Though I moved off Perl after that one short year, the internship started my professional programming career.

I’ve been programming for 25 years now!

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