Hah! It took me almost 40 years to 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 a professional programmer. ⁿᵒᵗ ᵇˡᵒᵒᵈʸ ʷᵒʳᵗʰ ⁱᵗ

I guess technically I was a hardware architect for 10 of them in the middle there. Although I was still writing a bunch of code, for money, so...

My first professional project was a patient database for my father, written in BASIC on an Amstrad 1512 with dual floppy disks and no hard drive.

I didn't really know what I was doing, but it was the first electronic database & analysis program in the hospital - his previous "database" was a big paper ledger book. My sister also earned some money by typing the data from that ledger into the database.

The hospital later made a proper database for a squillion dollars, but we defined the spec!

While at Altera our team classified ourselves as hardware engineers because it paid better than software. We *were* doing architecture with, but also place and route etc. that needed HW knowledge, so...

I prefer "Code Prostitute"

Hacker Of Negotiable Virtue.

Code Slut

The second oldest profession?

Anything before Y2K doesn't count.

Awesome! I'm not far behind at 38 years. In some ways, it doesn't feel like it has been that long of a career. But it also feels like it was more than a lifetime ago when I got my first programming job. Perception of time is weird.

Heh. 40 for me. RPG II on an IBM System 36. My brother was the programmer/admin for a medical testing lab and hadn't had a vacation in 2 years. He got them to hire me to train for the summer so he could take 2 weeks at the end. 4$ an hour, minimum wage. Learned a lot.

Whats the highlight ? the top projects..

Best game to play: StarTopia. Best tech: Oculus display stack Biggest impostor sense: Larrabee/AVX512 (vimeo.com/450406346) Most fun at the time: Rec Room

Love the best imposter syndrome - That thing is real