Are you a professional programmer?

[Salazaar]

For pure curiousness. Are you a professional programmer? I mean is it your job? And when have you started your journey with programming?
Regards

[jpn]

I wrote my first "hello world" application in 2001 when I started studying information technology at Tampere university of technology. I've been working as a software designer since April 2005. I met Qt about two years ago after we took it into use in a new project at work. I fell in love, immediately..

[DeepDiver]

I started back in the 80s with an Atari ST and OmicronBasic at the age of 14.
It was just cool to say: Yes I can write computer programs!

9 years a started my career as a professional software developer, software engineer, system designer, system architect ..... buzz-word-bingo

Since 2 years I'm self employed and develop cross-platform and distributed software for mid-size companies using linux (debian & kubuntu), windows, ZeroC ICE and - of course - Qt.

[fullmetalcoder]

Jeez! Am I the only fellow over there to whom programming remain just a hobby?

I doubt anyone care but here's how I caught the virus :

When I was about 11, my father bought a small book about C because he had to play a bit with that language at work. I read it and started coding immediatly. Of course it was rubbish (you can't even imagine... goto everywhere, no use of functions, ...) but some concepts were kinda hard to master back then.

Three years later, I got a TI calculator and fell back to programming. Basic-like language soon bored so I learnt assembly and did some decent stuff (considering the hardware and the language used it indeed was an achievement )

Finally I started enjoying C++ (surprinsigly, assembly appeared to help for it taught me a lot about the use (and abuse) of pointers....) but my first steps were a bit disappointing until I stumbled upon Qt 4, about two years ago : it's just SOOOOO addictive!

[Salazaar]

Jeez! Am I the only fellow over there to whom programming remain just a hobby?

Nope, Fmc, you're not alone

[Kumosan]

Please define: 'Professional programmer'.

[Michiel]

You're a professional programmer if programming is your job. As in, you do it professionally.

I've been a professional programmer on and off. At one time I actually did C++/Qt, but this quickly switched to PHP, unfortunately. Right now I'm not one.

I once started with Superlogo when I was 10. Made a small shooting game with it. I quickly switched to Visual Basic, because I didn't know any better. Now C++ is my language of choice.

[wysota]

I'd say a "professional programmer" means that your level of expertise in programming is high, regardless of the source of money you spend for your bread and butter. And also - define "programmer". Is it a person that writes code? Is making analysis programming as well? What if you actually don't get paid for writing the code but it is still part of your daily work? Does maintaining a programming forum make me a professional programmer?

[Salazaar]

I'd say a "professional programmer" means that your level of expertise in programming is high, regardless of the source of money you spend for your bread and butter. And also - define "programmer". Is it a person that writes code? Is making analysis programming as well? What if you actually don't get paid for writing the code but it is still part of your daily work? Does maintaining a programming forum make me a professional programmer?

Hehe I meant professional programmer - person whose job is developing software of something related (as you said for example analyzing code). You might do it professionally, but if it isn't your job, you aren't a professional. i hope I'd made it clear

[Kumosan]

Hehe I meant professional programmer - person whose job is developing software of something related (as you said for example analyzing code). You might do it professionally, but if it isn't your job, you aren't a professional. i hope I'd made it clear

According to your definition I am a professional programmer. Though I like wysota's definition better. Currently I have to work with code, which was also written by a 'professional programmer' (your definition), who should rather has gotten all his fingers broken than given access to a keyboard.

[Salazaar]

According to your definition I am a professional programmer. Though I like wysota's definition better. Currently I have to work with code, which was also written by a 'professional programmer' (your definition), who should rather has gotten all his fingers broken than given access to a keyboard.

I wouldn't call it being a professional programmer - working with code in that case (just only rewriting it because programmer has broken his fingers) can't be called programming
Regards

[wysota]

Define programming then

[Kumosan]

I wouldn't call it being a professional programmer - working with code in that case (just only rewriting it because programmer has broken his fingers) can't be called programming
Regards

Unfortunately this is what most professional programmers do: Working with other ppls. code. It is more a rare exception to be able to start a new system from scratch.

[SkylineBob]

According to your definition I am a professional programmer. Though I like wysota's definition better. Currently I have to work with code, which was also written by a 'professional programmer' (your definition), who should rather has gotten all his fingers broken than given access to a keyboard.

It would seem the complier can't parse "professional programmer". Use #define. lol.

[marcel]

In '97, in my first highschool year, and the program was written in Pascal.

[mnemonic_fx]

It seems most active people in this forum are Qt advanced programmer.

Just to tell my story:

I'm starting to learn serious programming directly in C++ at college (around 20 years old).

But after all those years until my graduation at 22 years old. I've mostly programmed in MATLAB , assembly, and embedded C. Because I'm an electrical engineering student.

After I graduate, I've got a job at startup company in Indonesia using Qt4
And Qt4 is great.., it has beautiful codes.

And I wish Trolltech and its customers would more actively promote the use of Qt in Asia.
Since most job market in Asia still dependent on Micr0s0ft technology.
We need to promote Qt, so we could have a good job market for Qt around Asia.
This would benefit Trolltech and me as a Software Developer (so I would not lose my job).

[GreyGeek]

My first training in "coding" was plugging banana cords on on the IBM 402 patch panel to control which columns in the cards tallied with what totals. That was 1959.

My next training was in graduate school in 1968. I took a "Numerical Analysis" class and we used Fortran 64 to code four examples. It took the entire semester and even then some folks didn't get the four examples done. First, using a KSR-133 keyboard at 10 cps you punched holes in a yellow paper tape to encode the solution and the data. Then the tapes were sent off for batch processing on the CDC 6600 mainframe in another town. The results of the run were printed on greenbar paper. If the programming was valid your solution was printed out, otherwise you got a source listing showing where the errors were. ANY typos at any stage of the process required a complete re-punching of the yellow tape. Some never got past that first step on the first problem. At this time very few colleges or universities offered computer programming classes. There wasn't any curriculum nor were there degrees in the subject matter being offered. Folks were learning it as part of Physics or Math courses, like I did. COBOL had been invented only three years before.

My next programming experience was in 1978 when I bought an Apple ][+. I taught myself Apple BASIC and a few months later was asked to teach it to other teachers in teacher extension courses. I was teaching science and math at the time and the store from which I bought the Apple asked me to come on weekends and demo it. I did. Then I began programming solutions to a problems that customers were asking about. My first computer sale was a 48K Apple ][+ with two Disk ][ drives and a Panasonic monitor. The printer was a Centronics line printer. Total package" $5,000 in 1979 dollars. My share: $2,500. My monthly take home pay from teaching; $700. The tale began wagging the dog. There were several other languages that became available for the Apple and I learned them all: Pascal, Forth, Prolog, COBOL, ... Within a year I had sold several hundred thousand worth of Apples, and $360,000 worth of an artificial intelligence card for the Apple called "Saavy". My share on that card was about $100K, but I never got to see a dime of it. (That's a story for another time.)

So, I quit teaching and selling Apples and started full time computer consulting and teaching programming for the next 15 years. My last client was the NE Dept of Revenue. One month into a 3 month project they created a programming position and asked me to apply. My wife loved the idea because that meant I would be home on evenings and weekends, instead of spending 6-8 weeks at a stretch on a project out of state. I will retire in 5 months.

[LeoVingi]

I prefer to call myself hobbyist , I know C&C++ and C# I didn’t yet use any of those languages professionally to write a project that can be used by others.
I just love to learn programming languages and I really love the C family of programming languages for some reason I m not sure about.
My first adventure in using some GUI framework for C++ was with MFC, I really liked MFC but lots of talking about MFC future and its easy to notice how MFC is old after using it for a while. so I learned C# trying to find easier way to write windows programs.
I m still improving my C# skills and the language is just huge the same apply to the BCL…
C# just good but it doesn’t match my criteria (portability, speed, popularity)…
Really using C++ makes me feel like pro!
So I did lots of research about many GUI class libraries for C++ out there, and I found that QT can be a better option than MFC.
Regards
Hatem.

[brent99]

I was selected in elementary school (we're talking about 1980 here) to pilot a program introducing students to computers around the 4th grade. I remember being wowed that I could use the "?" for math "?4+3" would return 7 on an Apple, or something like that...

I would stay after school to write tiny basic programs. My brother and I eventually cajoled my grandmother to buy us a Vic 20 complete with a 20k memory adapter! I remember it costing something around $300. It came with a free plug-in copy of Radar Rat Race.

Not having a word processor, I wrote my own in BASIC around the 7th or 8th grade. I invented right justify, although my parents failed to patent it. My word processor worked fine but when you ran out of 20k memory, it would crash. You had to save bytes by using a '.' instead of a 0. I eventually typed in a popular machine language one from Run magazine. That was a fun day. I also won a programming contest sponsored by a college university that had a few thousand contestants in it. I went on to write a few simple Sprite games during high school, and I was involved in one local BBS system in Virginia that I ran on a friends computer.


I graduated from Carnegie Mellon in computer engineering and work as a software engineer in real-time/embedded systems programming. I've been hiding from GUI work for most of my 15 year career as programming GUIs for Windows suck. BUT...I started using QT early this year. Its easily the best GUI/C++ library I've ever used, and I've dabbled in just about everything at one time or another.

Being a professional isn't quite the party you imagine as a teenager, but its not all that bad either. For one, I got paid to post this message...haha. I spend nearly every day in front of a computer for hours and hours doing what often seems like an endless toil of problem solving and troubleshooting both at home and in the office. This has continued for about 25 years now. Its always funny to go into a job interview, get asked a couple oddball questions about some random programming language, and have the interviewer walk away having concluded that "I don't know much about computers..." lol.

[-=Freaky=-]

wow, lots of professionals here ...

i started programming when i was about 14 or 15, with c++ as my first programming language.
about a year ago i bought a qt book which was really cheap so i thought why not try it ... and i loved it instantly.

now i'm 17 and still going to school.
i wouldn't consider myself a "professional programmer", even though i make some money with programming as a "side job".

sincerely,
julian