Ryan's tips on becoming a self-taught programmer inspired me to finally write about my experience as an autodidact software developer!

Feeling like an impostor: it gets better

For the first years of my career as someone who gets paid to write code, I haven't felt comfortable because I'm self-taught. If you've met me recently you might not know I used to suffer from Impostor Syndrome. I was also a lot more socially awkward. Nowadays I have a lot more self-confidence, I go to a lot of meetups and conferences. A couple years ago I gave two talks at Agile Tour conferences (about Cucumber and Rails). In last June I spoke about dependencies and packaging in Ruby at RuLu (I still haven't watched the full video, it's really weird to see you speak). I'm not afraid to send a pull request to fix something in an Open Source project I use, even when I'm using it for the first time.

False start: Paper-Rock-Scissors on a graphing calculator

My introduction to programming was in middle school (I was around 13), when I wrote a graphical Paper Rock Scissors game on a Casio graphing calculator, in Casio Basic. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but the game worked. You could play with a friend or against the calculator. Pretty soon dozens of students from my high school painstakingly copied that source code by hand. I had never heard of Free Software at this point.

First computer, bedroom Linux sysadmin

A couple years after that my parents bought our first computer (a Pentium 75 with a 800MB hard drive). I never really thought about programming again, until the end of the nineties, when I started playing with HTML. In high school I was supposed to study literature because I decided I hated math and science when I was 15. At the university I was studying British and American Literature and Civilisation with students and teachers with an abysmal level. Still, I spent those years installing Linux distributions, playing with DNS servers, Apache (there was only one web server back then apart from IIS on Windows), mail servers... When you experiment a lot you tend to break things often, so you have to reinstall your OS a lot, but it's worth it!

Missed opportunity: book about programming.

One of my uncles actually knew how to program. A couple years after this first computer, he gave me a book about different programming languages. To this day I still don't know why I only read the first few chapters from that book. Maybe it was a bad book. Maybe I didn't care enough at the time.

IRC, mp3z. Cascading Style Sheets! It's the future!

After dropping out from university I was delivering mail as a substitute from time to time (the closest thing to nepotism a postman's son can get). The rest of the time I was hanging out on IRC with people from all over the world who were passionate about music and transfered files between hacked FTP servers (the FXP scene... now I'm feeling really old). Spending most of my days and nights on IRC helped me improve my English much faster than university ever could. At least if you ignore terrible habits such as ironically using "prolly" instead of "probably".

When the CSS Zen Garden launched in 2003 I became obsessed with HTML & CSS. I launched an online music label, 1985 Records (our slogan was "free music for nerds, by nerds") with a friend and hand-coded the website in a couple nights. Every time we added a new artist I created a new HTML page and edited the information by hand.

Getting started: I have no idea what I'm doing.

Are you trying to tell me I can write HTML and CSS and get money?!

For the longest time I never thought about using a programming language to build web pages, for years I wrote it all by hand (I never used a WYSIWYG editor). One day a friend of mine called me and offered me to actually get paid to turn his Photoshop designs into HTML and CSS. I was teamed up with a CS Engineer who was just about to graduate from an engineering school. He would write PHP and a MySQL database, and I would handle all the HTML and CSS, because he refused to write HTML. At that time JavaScript was just used to make buggy rollover menus, and I didn't think of myself as a "Frontend Developer", or even as a developer.

Wait, I can even fix bugs myself!

In the beginning I treated the code he sent me via email in tar.gz archives like the magic it was. He gave me enough directions on how to use his functions in my index.php page. At that time I was using Vim with the arrow keys disabled to force myself to use hjkl, because I thought that's how you should use Vim. That really confused this engineer guy. Almost immediately I ran into issues with the code he handed over to me. He wasn't writing tests, and he didn't even seem to try running the code before he sent it to me. After the second time I ended up with a PHP error on my screen, I investigated and managed to fix the error myself. Victory!

The scary world of SQL queries and PHP functions, or "full-stack" developer

As soon as this so-called "software engineer" graduated, he left us: he could actually get a real, well-paying job at some company that hires people who come from engineering schools like his. My boss asked me if I could handle taking over the backend too (PHP & MySQL). I still remember how stressed I was before, during and after that meeting at a restaurant. I had hand-written pages of planned database tables & columns. Big Design Up Front!

My boss at the time: So, can you do this PHP/MySQL thing?

Me: Huh, I guess... Look at all these columns I wrote down on these sheets of paper!

I delivered my first custom CMS several months after the planned deadline. The first one the other guy made was really simpled compared to this one, and I had everything to learn. Still, the customer paid the bill, and I got a tiny amount of it (based on a really low hourly rate, for a set number of hours, assuming I would deliver according to plans).

Finding a mentor

Nothing for a while. Then back to HTML & CSS.

Even after shipping my first hand-made CMS, I was still a beginner. I didn't know how to find another job as a programmer without a degree and only a couple months of experience.

I tried to learn C using the K&R book but I didn't go very far.

After a couple months my flatmate at the time introduced me to a common friend. He was looking for someone to write HTML/CSS and do a bit of design. I joined this soon-to-be-company that was building an e-commerce application, using Python and the TurboGears framework (a MVC web framework similar to Django or Rails).

Python, MVC framework, tests, Object Oriented Programming, Pair Programming, Extreme Programming. Whaaaaat?!

One of the founders of this company, Seb, was into Extreme Programming (this was 2007). While trying to make their application look a bit more presentable, I discovered a lot of things I could never have imagined: automated tests, pair programming, Object Oriented Programming (before that I only used a PHP 5 library that used objects once, to generate PDF files, without understanding anything about it). Seeing Python finally taught me that not every programming language has to be ugly like PHP and C. Seeing an MVC framework finally gave me an idea of how you can build an application that's not a huge mess of templates and helper functions.

Finally feeling like a "real" programmer

Hearing about all these new topics brought me on a long journey of learning everything I could. Every evening after work I would learn something new by pairing: building forms, writing tests, implementing linked lists (driven by tests) in Ada...

At this point I had to decide if I wanted to join an evening class, a two year program for adults, or keep learning on the job. I decided to do the latter!

After a couple months our e-commerce application was online, but the software stack we picked was too buggy and unstable. We decided to go with Ruby on Rails just before version 2.0 was released and rewrote the whole thing. Gradually I took more and more responsibilities in the backend. To this day Ruby is still my favorite programming language.

Writing command line programs, not just websites and web applications!

After a couple small Rails apps I ended up writing and maintaining command line tools for an avionics company as a contractor. It was scary and the most challenging project I've done so far. In addition to experienced embedded software engineers, this team had real engineers: people writing specs and algorithms for flight navigation systems! I was responsible for the software running on 50 computers and the Continuous Integration server: continuous delivery and the nightly build had to work properly, or we would lose time and a lot of money.

It was also the first time I wrote Ruby code outside of Rails! The tools did a lot of different things: from abstracting source control to compiling the code, running test suites, generating traceability and certification reports... Critical embedded software that goes into civilian airplanes have to comply with tons of rules, unlike... nuclear plants or cars, but that's another topic.

To this day I'm really proud that this software is still used in two major avionics projects. I learned a lot from that team: they were pioneers in Lean Software Development in critical embedded software.

Back to system administration for a while, professionally this time.

Last year I made the decision to switch to system administration and infrastructure automation as a consultant and co-founder of Green Alto. I gained a lot of experience, and now I feel it's time for me to go back to software development. I'm currently learning Ember.js & C (before I learn Rust).

We made it. You can too!

It took me several years to start feeling comfortable as a developer without degree or title. I've often thought about sharing how I learned to program, but I had never done it before. Ryan Levick from 6Wunderkinder explains how he did it.

Becoming a programmer is not something you can learn by merely attending fancy Computering classes. Even if you have a Computer Science degree, you still have to be passionate about programming, practice, read books, watch presentations, try different languages, read code, write code. I hope our articles will inspire many other people to become programmers.

I'm glad to be part of the welcoming community that's the Ruby community in Berlin. I'm excited that initiatives like Rails Girls and Hackership exist. The other self-taught developers I've met are passionate and eager to learn. I highly recommend finding a great mentor (thanks again Seb for everything you taught me over the years, I owe you everything!).

I hope other self-taught developers will feel comfortable faster now that there's more of us!