I recently read a blog's about page where the autor mentioned to have 11 years of programming experience, parenthesizing that he started really young. Although I certainly don't think any serious professional experience should include the kind of coding you do as a kid, it made me remember how I started programming myself when I was a a child.

I didn't have my own computer before 1996, when I started secundaria (junior high school). Previously, my only computers' experience had been playing around with Flow on my elementary school's very recent computer lab. Those Commodores were cool but didn't really caught completely my attention. I was slightly surprised when, on late 95 or early 96 I went to my friend's place and saw he had a computer that displayed really neat colors and you could draw freely without a command line interface but with a mouse, a toolbar and all. As I learned later, that must have been Paint on either Windows 3.1 or 95. I was much more interested on that kind of computer action since I was more into paper drawing than the actual computer at the time. But it didn't caught completely my attention either (I was a very lame uninterested kid, I guess). During that time, I started playing with my cousin's machine in Mexico City, running Windows 3.1, but I was very afraid to use it or ask to use it, since I had no clue what to do with it. When my dad bought me my first computer, my cousin Bruno was my first-hand information resource. I remember I asked him if he knew how I could get rid of the "Acer" blue screen that appeared immediately every time I booted the machine. He said "that, I don't know".

I remember I had no Internet connection for like an entire year (come on, it was already late 1996!) and I used the computer primarily as a typewriter. I could do my homework papers in it and pretend I was a graphic designer (I was still into drawing) using Paint. I didn't have (or didn't know it existed) Microsoft Office, but I had this thing installed called Microsoft Works where I used to do it all. In early 1997 I started surfing the Web using Telmex's "Internet Directo Personal", the pre-Prodigy (Mexico's most popular ISP these days) service. At school, I started learning QuickBASIC and since I was some kind of nerd as a child, I also bought some literature around the topic on magazine stands and that way I became very, very interested on the topic of programming. Around 1998, when I was 13 or 14, I used to do a lot of little programs in it, that was really my first experience with code. But I never got too deep into anything, I wonder why now. My family owned and operated a seafood restaurant, and I came up with an entire program (written in QBasic) for the waiters to order on the computer and print their orders in the kitchen where the cooks would pick it up and dispatch it. But I only knew QBasic, all of the food menu was a never-ending list of variables, I had no clue what a database was (I didn't have Access or didn't even know what it was), etc. The entire code was a single file, with a lot of if-then's and goto calls. I wish I still had that code.

What I rescue telling this is that coding as a child was a experience full of fun. I remember I loved to spend hours and hours thinking on how to come up with a better "interface" on the program, if you could call it like that. Sometimes I hope I could still retain that kid momentum when programming or that I could have kept it when I first went to college. The worst part of programming is that one sometimes forgets that it is lots of fun.