Pro and hobbyist. I started by learning Basic back in the late 1970’s. Got a EE with strong emphasis on Analog and DSP. Did analog for test and measurement systems but had to add microprocessors (and EPROMs and RAM) to build the systems that control the analog. For embedded I learned C. For PCs I did Basic, Forth (ugh), Turbo Pascal, Delphi, then C#. I’m heavy into unit testing. I did web development as well, back in 1997 to maybe 2010. Perl, PHP, MySQL, Linux, then Drupal. A lifetime ago.
I can’t tell what I’m working on now (professionally) but hobby-wise I do a lot of arduino stuff and some of it has been a blast. I did an automatic dog food dispenser a few years back that was an amazing tour of engineering your way out of failure. The look on my dogs face when the MK1 version sent a fire-hose stream of dog food across the room was awesome.

I’m old (a few years shy of 50), and a second generation professional programmer. E.g.: when I was in kindergarten, my father’s main job was maintaining the COBOL compiler on a particular series of Sperry-Univac mainframes. I grew up in a house where the scratch paper for grocery lists was punchcards because my dad brought home reams of unused ones when they were being thrown out in the early 80s. (Fun fact: with a sharp pencil, it’s totally possible to fit a full D&D character sheet on the back of an unused punchcard)

So for “how did I get started”, I was born into it; I was of the age when you’d get magazines in the mail with code to type in (later, the magazines came with audio cassettes with programs on them). So BASIC initially, then in high school my dad got us a copy of Turbo Pascal and set me loose on that. (Plus tiny TSRs in x86 assembly)

I had a few mid- and upper-level programming classes in undergrad., but was a pure math major, not CS. (so didn’t get any CS theory classes, though I did have a job working for campus networking people) After grad school, I got a job writing code in java and perl for a company you’ve never heard of unless you were in a particular corner of the finance world in the late 90s/early 2000s. I’m now on my third or fourth employer, depending on whether you count a buyout that kept the team intact but moved offices as a change in employer.

My day-to-day coding these days is primarily in python and C++, but in the past six months it’s also included work haskell and go, not to mention sh scripts and the weird groovy dialect used in Jenkins.

Oddly enough, my hobbyist stuff these days has all been HTML+javascript because it just makes simple GUI demos so easy. It’s kind of wild coming from the mid-90s when I was heavily involved in early web stuff at my undergrad school to this new world where javascript mostly works and is a basically sensible language. Recent-ish projects have included a solver for the NYTimes “digits” game, a Mandlebrot set viewer and the “come back for more meeting” timer at breakmessage.com.

I started off in 2005 on Neopets. There was a feature that let you create your own custom pages for anything which I thought was the coolest thing at the time. I had to learn HTML and CSS to get started.

Turns out that was way cooler than Neopets. Don’t get me wrong, Neopets is awesome, but I absolutely fell in love with building with code back then. Fast-forward to now, I’m a senior dev at a VC studio helping various startups get off the ground.

I’m a fan of learning and building, so it’s kept me in this career ever since. It’s been fun seeing the times change with all sorts of tech. Am a giant fan of FOSS and love contributing where I can.

Ive been learning for a year. I just want to get change careers because ive hit a cap in my earnings in my current one. The past year has been doing a bunch of fun python projects and javascript, and soaking in as much as I can.

Currently, working on codelabs and learning jetpack compose with Kotlin. It has been very fun learning this and a week in.

i gotta get out of this call center, but im ignoreing all the noise and following what makes me excited to learn, and right now thats android development lol.

Am sysadmin by trade. I started when my manager told me to add 1000 people to a group. This rapidly lead me to learning how to script and build tools for my team…

Then my team leader asked if I could make the tools run from a web site but only using free stuff. So html, js and php followed. MySQL when I wanted to start logging capabilities. 10 years later and now running on Laravel here we are!

Current title is “data architect”, but titles are meaningless. I sorta do whatever needs doing. Usually that means working with large databases and fixing performance issues. Right now I’m mostly focused on a distributed postgres database cluster using Citus (~5TB of data). Working with the data is fun, dealing with so many ingestion pipelines is annoying though.

Got my start in Jr High doing a bunch of web dev. Took a class called “computer math” in high school which was really just C and C++ programming (little bit of java). Did a comp sci degree in college. Pretty standard route I guess. Early in my career I discovered that I understand data better than most people for some reason (yay autism I guess). So I get focused on database problems and teaching people how to make data models that are usable and query-able and index-able.

Hobbyist, professional, hobbyist.

Started with the VIC-20 shortly after the birth of my son. Ended up teaching a few community association recreational classes, which led to teaching introductory programming (among other things) at a private tech school.

That, in turn led to a few requests for small custom programs, software modifications, etc, and eventually my own freelance programming business doing everything from shop floor work order management to Palm Pilot integrations with, yes, mainframe systems.

When that business failed, I went to work full-time for my only remaining client. When that business was sold, the new owners made it clear that I was dead weight, so I left the field entirely and we moved to our cabin at the lake. (That was also the beginning of 10 years with no internet or cell service at home. Now we have Starlink.)

A decade later, I’m about to retire completely and I’m slowly getting back into it as a hobby.

I’ve always been a bit of a language junkie, but my current focus is on go, mostly because I’d like to better understand what’s going on under the hood in my current favourite language, Charm, which is written in go.

In retirement, assuming I can pull myself away from my shop and my fishing rod, I hope to build an as yet undetermined bit of software that others find useful or contribute to a project.

Both, though since going pro, I have less time for hobby coding. Or rather I should say, my eyes and brain can only take so much.

I’ve been a hobbyist script guy for a long time, and had no aspirations to start a career as a SWE. The opportunity just fell into my lap, when I joined a startup in an entry level support position, and wrote some tools to make my workflows easier. A director took notice, and got me a position on a new engineering team. The rest is history. Turns out I really like doing it professionally, as well.

I’m a BE engineer, working mostly in Python. Telecommunications stuff, can’t really say more.

Really I would consider myself both, but to answer the question you’re actually asking Professional.

I’ve known that software development was what I wanted to do since early in high school, programming has been a large part of my life since then.

I’m working on Ruby on Rails stuff these days, but Python is my true love. I also have a goofy website that I enjoy hacking on.

Professional. I was a software developer for 4 years on the Microsoft stack. I am now a Product Architect.

Been keenly working on my own indie games, focusing primarily around Unity. It’s been great to leverage my skills and make something fun to play.

I released a low poly city builder a few years back and I’m always looking at ways to polish it up.

I’ve worked on a range of websites, apps and extensions but creating a game from scratch has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

I’ve been a professional software engineer in the game industry for 22 years now. I started off in school at first on Apple computers with Basic, then when I got a graphing calculator in school I started writing tools for school work and games on it all the time. After college, I wasn’t sure what sort of software I wanted to work on (dot-com era), but one of my good friends talked me into applying to some game companies. I’ve been in a bunch of different companies since then but right now I’m working on online systems for one of the biggest online games.

Professional on a haitus here. Fully self taught, done a ton of hobby projects, most of my fleshed out ones being in either C89 or C99. Most recently has been a calculator application for myself in X11 too brush off the rust on my X11 knowledge, as well as a Lemmy client library for C.

Found out I’m really fucking good with Databases and SQL after failing my coding courses when I wanted to be a programmer. 15 years later I’m still going strong with a good career with Databases.

I’d love to be able to make my own API for a personal project and design a front-end for it but no matter how hard I try I can’t get my head around the software dev side of things

Professional. I started out with Basic, then QBasic and Java in high school. Made a Geocities site.

Years later, I was bored and decided to learn Python. Had enough fun doing that that I decided to go to school for it.

Now I’m a full-time programmer, mostly doing web app stuff. I spend much, much less time doing programming for fun, but I’m a huge fan of learning new languages.