2024-09-29: My Path into Programming
I'm an amateur programmer. I mostly taught myself, though I have taken a single, solitary Computer Science 101 course at the community college level. I got into it by a very oblique path, the strangeness of which influences my approach and preferences to this day.
Early Years: Trying and Failing
I first tried to get into programming when I was 14. I heard about PyGame from somewhere (probably googling around for "how to program games beginner") and tried downloading Python 2.7 to see if I could make it work. This was in 2005 or thereabouts—before YouTube tutorials, before free "learn to program" online self-paced courses, before any of the resources that exist today were accessible to a homeschooler like me with no mentor and no idea what he was doing.
My initial foray was not successful. I have no idea how close I got to something even close to working, but it felt like I was permanently a thousand miles off target. For all I know I might have just capitalized something that should have been lower case, but the effect was the same regardless—I left my brief attempt at being a "game developer" dejected and discouraged because every time I tried to follow a guide or tutorial and couldn't even follow along with the guide I was trying to use, I just felt like an utter failure.
Later: Some Modest Success
Over a decade later, I discovered sentdex on YouTube.
Finally this felt different. For starters, I enjoyed watching his videos all by themselves. I could understand the things he was doing, even if I didn't have the background knowledge of the language that would've let me read and understand his code unassisted.
But eventually I decided to try following along, typing things in line by line, even faithfully recreating his mistakes and then following his process step by step of debugging and getting back on track.
By following along with sentdex, I got a few simple demos working. It certainly wasn't sophisticated, but one or two of the things he demoed were actually mildly impressive once I had them going on my own machine (I remember a reinforcement learning algorithm that actually, really worked!).
As an Adult: The Oblique Path
[WIP]
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