When did you fall in love with coding?

This question may not apply to everyone. Not everyone is passionate about coding. There are people who write software out of pure necessity (ie pay the mortgage). Then there are people like me who write software for the fun of it. I love to explore new technologies and build sample programs exercising the different features of technology. For example, if I have free time on the weekend, I would prefer learning about the hot technology X instead of watching a football game. Granted, I enjoy watching sports, but I love writing software.

I have to be careful here. I don’t want to come off as a pocket-protector wearing geek. But I find something totally fascinating about developing software and then watching the program run. At every stage of my software career, I was always proud of the software that I produced. Be it a business app for processing medical claims or an ecommerce app for collecting tolls on the Golden Gate bridge. I am a proud papa of each one of my software products 🙂

Now to answer my own question…I fell in love with coding in 1982. I was a 7th grader in middle school. We were introduced to Applesoft Basic for the Apple ][ computer. Once I learned the basics of displaying text, reading user input and conditional branching then I was hooked! So basically, any process that I dreamed up in my head, I could transcribe it into code (with some effort of course).  For the remainder of junior high and high school, I split my time between writing software and playing video games. Okay, maybe more of the latter, but I was totally hooked.

Anyways, that’s my story. When did you fall in love with coding?