- Why did you get into the field? What did you focus on at first?
Got gifted a 286, and wanted to know how it worked. A retired friend of my father gave me the K&R book and I devoured it. I focused on input/output and calculations, (much) later moving to MUDs, and (much later) moving it to the web, too.
- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?
Web-dev/sysadmin/jack-of-all-techs/tech-lead. It's everything I dream of, and have nightmares about. It's great! I get to both use known/proven/old things to build something new & useful; learn new things to build something with; and learn new things to then know when to not use them.
- How did you break that first-job barrier?
~20y ago, a newly founded start-up needed an apprentice who knew C/asm and was interested in home automation and... there I was! I can't remember details about the interview itself, but it was mostly about attitude and very little coding, as I think I already worked with them on a separate project (the C "main" routine for the C/CGI behind a search engine they had created a library for) and they knew I had the chops they wanted.
- What were you doing before this?
High school then a couple years at uni/informatics doing not much. Didn't finish.
- Any tips for the rest of us?
Make it work, make it pretty/proper/right, make it fast enough. Buildings are created from strong foundations; learn your/the basics really well. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. YAGNI. Printf-based debugging is totally fine. Communication is a big deal, and I suck at it. Communicate, communicate, communicate, and then communicate some more.
Got gifted a 286, and wanted to know how it worked. A retired friend of my father gave me the K&R book and I devoured it. I focused on input/output and calculations, (much) later moving to MUDs, and (much later) moving it to the web, too.
- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?
Web-dev/sysadmin/jack-of-all-techs/tech-lead. It's everything I dream of, and have nightmares about. It's great! I get to both use known/proven/old things to build something new & useful; learn new things to build something with; and learn new things to then know when to not use them.
- How did you break that first-job barrier?
~20y ago, a newly founded start-up needed an apprentice who knew C/asm and was interested in home automation and... there I was! I can't remember details about the interview itself, but it was mostly about attitude and very little coding, as I think I already worked with them on a separate project (the C "main" routine for the C/CGI behind a search engine they had created a library for) and they knew I had the chops they wanted.
- What were you doing before this?
High school then a couple years at uni/informatics doing not much. Didn't finish.
- Any tips for the rest of us?
Make it work, make it pretty/proper/right, make it fast enough. Buildings are created from strong foundations; learn your/the basics really well. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. YAGNI. Printf-based debugging is totally fine. Communication is a big deal, and I suck at it. Communicate, communicate, communicate, and then communicate some more.