I consider myself both but I'm progressively leaning more and more professional.
First off, I'm 100% self-taught. I discovered Linux around 2003 and immediately learned, several times, how not to install it and multiple really good ways of destroying data on a hard drive. I have had the open source / Linux bug ever since.
I went to school for CS for about two semesters before I dropped out. I then started off my career in IT of all places, I was a helpdesk IT administrator. About 12 years ago I landed a job where most of my responsibilities revolved around Linux servers and workstations (academic research lab). I started learning more about systems automation and configuration management tools/languages/strategies. This constantly lead me down roads involving reading source code for projects that I used day-to-day when something didn't go right. This lead to filing bug reports and ultimately making a pull-request here or there to fix my own issues.
Fast forward two jobs and 10 years and I've migrated to a role where the majority of my day is writing systems code. Most of it is in Go now but I still maintain a handful of Python/Django applications as well. The majority of the tools I write for work are focused on developer experience, cloud automation and internal CI/CD pipelines. In my personal time, I contribute to a number of open source projects.
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.
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'm a professional. I'm currently working on some side projects like storybot, a blog written only by AI or ai-guessr, wordle but with AI images.
I did some years of Game Development, but mainly it was a mix of having a first job where I had to "learn how to learn" and then working a lot on side projects.
I find that side projects is the main way to learn and experiment. In a corporate job you can't experiment (and break stuff so much) so someone that codes as a hobby has experienced way more situations that could work in a professional environment.
I'm a professional, I went to uni where I learned some theoretical computer science as well as to code properly (although I'd been a casual hobbyist a year or so before) and have been in the industry ever since as a software engineer. I've always been primarily focussed on the backend but I could keep a postgres database ticking over if push came to shove and I'm currently cross-training to do some operations stuff too as I don't think I've ever worked on a team with enough staff let alone a reasonable bus factor in my life. I'm definitely a startups person too at least for the time being, job security's been pretty dreadful lately but I'll take insecure but interesting work over safe and boring for now while I don't have a house or kids to worry about.
At the moment I'm working for a medtech company using AI to speed up cancer diagnoses, really cool stuff that I'd probably have palmed off as the press sensationalising things if I hadn't seen it work first hand.
I'm an electrical engineer by education. Got my first job in industrial automation, and have worked through several roles and fields over 13 years. I'm now an IT architect at a large industrial company, working on embedded device connectivity, message brokering and data management. Love my job! :)
I'm a software engineer, but I'm still pretty early in my career and have done mostly QA. I'm currently being integrated into a new team where I'll actually get to develop on a C# and Angular project! I've done a little dev work on a much smaller Angular project so I'm really excited.
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.
self taught webdev here
as part of a devops course, I built a cool little ninite-inspired sveltekit app that lets you generate a script for installing Homebrew and any apps and packages you want automatically on Macs!
currently hosted on vercel (i'm not good at devops), no plans for ads to be included or anything! source code is available here, and brewskie is right this way!
would love to get some feedback, i'm sure there are ways this can be done a lot better haha
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.
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.
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
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!
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