I wanted to have a cool geocities page, so I needed some HTML. Later I wanted to do downloads and forms… maybe a domain is in order. Learned some php and javascript. Discovered desktop languages, this C# stuff is pretty neat, I can do a lot with it. It’s versatile. Oops now I’m getting a paycheck for this silliness, and depending on it to eat.

Back in the day - it was around 2003 - I had a band and I wanted my band to have a website. That is when I installed Frontpage which let you design it with drag and drop. I had a menu which I wanted to show on each page, so I used serverside injection which Frontpage offered to do that. Later I found out that you tan even dynamically change the menu to highlight on which page you are if you do it with PHP and to a '[HTML_REMOVED]`. From there I added more dynamic things until I had some software on my hands.

But this was not the first time I got into coding actually. First time was around 1992 when my dad bought me an Amiga 500 and it came with the AMIGABasic handbook. Back then while most of my friends only used it for games, I somehow got interested in trying to make the computer do what I want. So I wrote some small games, some animations, even a book lending management program. But after some years i stopped being interested in computers until ten years later.

I was a self taught programmer who 10+ years later is now a senior software engineer. I can’t tell you what to do but I can tell you what worked for me.

The reality is, I never sat down with the intent to “learn programming”. Instead, I had practical ideas for things I wanted to make the computer do, and then I learned whatever was necessary to accomplish my projects as I went. Whenever I got stuck or hit an error, I’d search my questions online.

I never truly “finished” most of these early projects but they gave me a practical understanding of how things fit together. From there I just kept making stuff and taking on harder projects and then harder jobs and eventually other programmers started coming to me asking for help because they knew I had solved the thing they were working on before.

I’m not sure if it’s advice, but I’d say stop worrying about learning and just do. If you like firmware, go buy some shitty unsupported peripheral from Goodwill and try to make it work on your modern system. Solve a problem you have in your everyday life. It doesn’t matter if you accomplish the goal, you’ll learn a lot by googling your way through it. Do that enough and you’ll wake up one day and be a competent programmer.

I started with HTML and CSS because I liked to build my own useless small websites. Then I noticed it was nice to copy+paste some javascript scripts someone else wrote into them to get some “fun” interactive components. Then I slowly started to make little changes to those scripts and that way slowly learned more and more. It was not the quickest way to learn, but the most fun, because there was little setup necessary (I literally used windows notepad to save files as .html and opened them in my browser) and I could quickly see results.

Since you’re interested in FOSS I assume you use an OS with a nice terminal. You could write some bash scripts to do simple tasks for you maybe? (Maybe write a script that removes old downloads from your downloads folder, or something that can delete all files that end in ‘.temp’ (IDK just stupid ideas that could be fun to try to start coding).

Python is a nice option as well, it has a lot of useful options and documentation and gives you very readable code, making it easier to learn good practices!

Just make sure you do something fun and you will learn what’s necessary along the way.

When I was young, around 10, I was bored. We had one shitty desktop and no internet 99% of the time (we had dial up but only 1 landline, and my mom used the phone alot). We were also homeschooled, and the software teaching us was on that computer. I found the software documentation which was in HTML, and used that to make my own “website”.

Even before then though I had a draw to tinkering with computers. After a bit I convinced my mom to get me intro to C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup, and messed with that for a good year or so. Then we upgraded to DSL when I was around 13 and I got into Roblox and learned Lua, then other languages.

I was undeclared but leaning towards a stats major in college - I started working with SAS and found I liked building the solutions more than figuring out the statistics of it all.

I don’t I’m just a server setter…

In high school a learned a bit programming but I did not like it much back then. Later on a 386 computer I discovered qbasic with nibbles.bas (snake game) and gorillas.bas. I figured out how to more lives in nibbles.bas by modifying it’s qbasic. This made me more interested in programming and try write my own games in qbasic.

I started my career with it, studying it in college. Relying on it for finances definitely is a major push. I don’t touch it for a hobby though because of that. Hopefully others can help with suggestions for that side of things.

I feel like you’re trying to fight an uphill battle. I find it’s always easiest to learn in a way that motivates or invigorates me.

For example, I wanted to play games with my friends so I got into hosting a Minecraft server. It was hell at first to learn all the individual pieces, but I was motivated and it led me down the path of learning networking, basic server client architecture, and performance monitoring. That kind of spiralled out into making my own plugin, too. Despite the fact that I never ran a server with more than 5 active players or finished my plugin, it sent me down a path learning tons of new stuff because it was fun for me.

I transitioned into webapp development later on by trying to make an idea I had come to life. This was well before I had even heard the word “startup” and I had no business sense, but I wanted to make something and was very motivated to hack my way through it. I didn’t finish that either, but I still use those skills I learned today.

As others have said, rather than learn a language, solve a problem. Find something that bothers you, and write some code to fix it. The specific language doesn’t matter.

Its kinda similar to learning a spoken language, there is no point learning French if you cant use it in someway.

I learned Minecraft (and other video games) were made with coding, so I had to learn it to make my own.

I was like 8-10 and found a tutorial on how to use eclipse. I thought I followed it to the letter, but it didn’t compile.

At 12, my math teacher offered python courses, so I attended them and yeah.

I started “programming” by writing triggers in the Warcraft 3 editor 😅.

Later learned C++, then went to uni and learned more and the deeper theory.

If you’re just a hobbyist, Python is a good choice. If you want to learn more deeply, I’d recommend Rust over something like C. Feel free to mention/message me if you have Rust questions.

I’m genX, so I grew up with 80s microcomputers. Programming was pretty much the only thing you could do with them.

I mean im in tech and im on a dev team but I come from ops/admin and I while I get the idea of dev ops I still don’t like calling it development because I simply do not have the 10k hours of coding experience. I work with and modify files in various languages and more often than not simply configuration files that are just a format. I sorta have the same feelings as you but I know I won’t really get there unless im doing it the majority of the time over the course of a few years and I doubt that is going to happen.