well, the first time I made a "program" of any kind was when I was 6 or 7, and I made a batch file in DOS to help launch any of the games I was playing at the time. When I had it up and working, I thought it was the coolest thing ever :) From there, I started programming on the Apple IIe (anyone remember LOGO?) and then moved on to basic, then on to other higher level languages. Even when I was in my teens, I never really thought that programming would be my professional career of choice.

After I graduated college, I actually started off as an IT support guy, as I had a lot of experience for that. However, the company I worked at wanted custom web apps built, so they gave me that work to do for when my IT duties were completed. That's when I really realized how much I enjoyed coding, making things from scratch, I thought, was pretty awesome!

Fast forward 7 years, and I was ready to move on from my job as I was getting burnt out on the IT side of things. I landed a pure web development role, and haven't looked back since.

As for advice, the biggest piece of advice I can offer is don't be afraid to fail, especially if you're new to the field. Learn how to ask for help, and take the time on how to google things. This may seem like a trivial thing, but it's actually very important.

Good programmers know when they need help, and the really good ones know how to find that help online!

Good luck and welcome to HN :)

The first experience at a full time programming job was somewhat disappointing. Quickly found out how easily quality gets sacrificed to meet deadlines. And how much slower it is to fix bugs in a millions-of-lines unknown codebase versus your own project.

I had quite some solo experience so the language-level stuff was pretty easy. But I learned a lot about building maintainable large systems, like architecture and habits, which is nice.