How I became a Programmer
- 4 minsAbout childhood (excerpt from attendee notes)
…
Alex: Hello, my name is Alex, and I am a programmer.
Doctor: Let’s support Alex together.
(sound of applause)
Alex: To be honest, I’m not always been a programmer. True. I even was not born with hands embedded in the keyboard (the approving nod of attendees).
For example, there was a time when I was an ordinary child of five years… Although there was a time when I was even less! (good and naive smiles went on their faces). But once… (sighed) Once, when I was five, my mother bought me a toy truck with a clockwork mechanism. The first time I played with it as a normal child, without ulterior motives, but then I wondered how it’s made, how it works… Well, you know. I took my favorite screwdriver and disassembled it in five minutes. I did it before and didn’t suspect what it could lead to… And when I pulled out the last gear wheel and metal spring from the clockwork mechanism… Well, you know, that one, all in machine oil, which is very elastic… (sighed again) at that moment my mother came in and said that since I broke the truck, she wouldn’t buy toys anymore… Well, what could I do? (biting his lip) I could not restrain myself and assembled it back, and unfortunately it worked!..
(the attendees lowered their eyes, the doctor folded his arms and looked at the floor somewhere)
Alex: And when mom saw that the truck was working, she was surprised and at other times bought me toys again, which of course led to… You know… (through tears, with lower voice) I began to assemble new toys from their parts (the doctor closed his eyes tightly). So… That’s how… I became an addict to engineering…
(lowered his eyes, slowly sat on his chair; silence)
Doctor (as if having come to his senses): Let’s support Alex.
(sound of inconfident applause) …
About teenage years (~14 y.o.)
Once in the late spring I came to visit my childhood friend. He and his brother did a rather unusual thing: my friend was dictating some English words from a book, and his brother was pressing the buttons of the black box with the ZX Spectrum sticker. In response, letters appeared on the small TV, lining up the list.
– What are you doing, guys?
– We’re programming the game! It remains quite a bit to finish. – answered Sanya.
None of us understood what Sanya dictated and what his brother typed on keyboard. We just wanted to play.
After 10 minutes they finished, his brother typed RUN on the keyboard, pressed Enter and the inscription SOKOBAN appeared on the screen. The game has begun!
Not to say I’ve never seen a computer before that time. I had an 8-bit game console, like Dendy, so computer games were a very familiar and favorite hobby for me. However, I never thought about what was behind all this.
The guys started to play, and I picked up a book and started flipping through it, looking through the listings of game programs.
Looking at the programs, it seems that every word is familiar, there weren’t any incomprehensible squiggles, despite I was Russian guy and had only basic knowledge of school-English. Very bad English (now the same, but a bit better 
).
In 30 minutes the guys played a lot, and I suggested to write another game – “Guess The Number” – one player thinks and types a number on the keyboard, then it is erased by program from the screen. Then the other player guesses it at the prompts of the program suggest the direction of guess: more or less. Turned out, it was very easy.
It intrigued me to change the program a little and make it possible to guess TWO numbers at the same time. Super easy!
Well, it was the first taste of programming.
I felt even more taste when later, without any prompting, books or programming experience, I realized how graphic sprites were formed in the SOKOBAN game. These were simple binary codes where every bit was responsible for a pixel! It was ecstasy! I could draw anything! It was enough to draw an 8x8 matrix on a piece of paper and count 8 byte numbers for each row and it turned to a new image of the hero of the game or a piece of the wall!
From now on, I began to visit my friend to test my programs, which I thought up at home and wrote down in a notebook. Not a laptop, just a notebook, using a pencil! =) This continued until my father bought me my own old ZX Spectrum for some pennies. But what it was a surprise! I had my own computer with embedded BASIC language – I could to program any time I wanted! I was totally happy.
The journey into programming world has begun…
Alex Medveshchek
Backend Developer addicted to Natural Language Processing