from Hacker News

Talking over a wall changed my direction as a programmer

by fagnerbrack on 12/20/24, 3:10 AM with 72 comments

• by ThomW on 12/21/24, 11:14 PM

  I feel super fortunate to be a part of that generation where screwing around at home could lead directly to employment. I taught myself Atari BASIC on my 800 and took a 286 IBM compatible to college where I was a music major. I dropped out and landed working for an industrial automation company because I knew how to write dumb little programs. A couple years later I was the sole guy programming robots for them in a structured BASIC language.

• by 2b3a51 on 12/22/24, 5:11 PM

  Quote from OA

  "About 15 years later I ran into that manager again, and he was close to dying from a kidney ailment. I spent a day with him, driving him around so he could take some photographs, and having lunch. We didn't talk much about work, mostly he wanted to get out of being in bed and see the world a bit."

  Just deLurking to say that was an excellent thing to do. This small paragraph tucked away at the end of the anecdote shifted the whole experience for me.

• by dr_kiszonka on 12/21/24, 9:43 PM

  The author is on HN and makes awesome art at https://andrewwulf.com

• by ian-g on 12/22/24, 12:33 AM

  > Today I make generative art, see it on my website

  I do love the ways random events can change folks’ lives. Would the author have ended up doing art at all without this happening?

• by Scubabear68 on 12/22/24, 7:02 PM

  I had my interest in computing cemented when I was about 16 in the early 1980’s I volunteered that summer at a local hospital where my cousin worked running one of the test labs.

  They had an apple II and some equipment they figured might be able to interface with it. Like the article author, I basically got a few manuals and just figured out how to make it work. I was able to do some simple control of one of the new instruments via the RS-232 serial connection, plus print out some it’s internal state.

  I was very proud that all the other volunteers were basically candy stripers, and I was doing software development in a lab environment.

  I would have gone bonkers with everything available today. But then again, in the 80s the sorting function was very strong - you were either one of those who could figure this stuff out, or you weren’t. Then of course, there were further delineations. Case in point, my apple ii basic and 6502 assembly hacks in the lab sound like child’s play compared to what this dude did!

• by fcatalan on 12/22/24, 8:15 AM

  I was studying Physics, not out of particular interest, just because it was challenging, so I was doing badly.

  I then discovered a small room that had two unsupervised computers hooked up to some mysterious world-spaning network, and made friends there, ended up leaving Physics for Computer Science.

  My first job and every job in my 20s came from people I met in that room getting jobs themselves and calling me to see if I would go work with them, or someone from the previous jobs calling me back. I've never done a real job interview or sent a CV.

  But then I formed a family and my social life plummeted. I'm also bad at really nurturing relationships that don't self sustain, so in retrospect I can see how my career ossified since then.

  I don't totally regret it because even if I'm now underpaid and underemployed, I earn more than enough for my lifestyle and have loads of free time, so it balances the pang for greater things.

  But yeah, networking is very important.

• by yapyap on 12/21/24, 11:10 PM

  Yeah, networking can give you the world.

  Often networking is seen as this robot-like bleep bloop hello, here’s my business card thing and at the dedicated events it very well could be but networking in the most basic sense is just making friends and shooting the shit, only difference is that you can leverage those friends for opportunities in the workplace and vice versa.

• by otteromkram on 12/22/24, 3:59 PM

  > So when they asked who could write 6502 assembly on an Apple II, I raised my hand figuring everyone here was a programmer — and found only my hand had been raised!

  Pre comedy. I can just imagine the initial indifference when raising his hand only to look around and start lowering his hand slowly when one of the bosses just looks at him and says, "You. No, not him. YOU. You stay, everyone else can leave."

• by cranberryturkey on 12/22/24, 3:07 PM

  I was late to programming. I had a computer in junior high but didn’t start programming until the mid 90s when I got internet access at college.

• by oceanparkway on 12/21/24, 3:29 AM

  Metal desks!

• by AlienRobot on 12/22/24, 7:58 PM

  >I raised my hand figuring everyone here was a programmer—and found only my hand had been raised

  I guess some things never change.

• by commandersaki on 12/21/24, 11:53 PM

  Eh, I read the article and I still don't know what it means to "talk over a wall".

• by wlindley on 12/21/24, 10:00 PM

  It's a program. "App" is a word, short for "Application Program," publicized by Apple for its handheld computers that masquerade as (and are euphemistically called) "telephones." "App" effectively means "proprietary closed-source program that talks to proprietary walled-garden programs running on someone else's computer, and acts as a spy sending all your sensitive data to who-knows-where."

  No-one ever called a real program an "app" before that, did they?