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Ask HN: When did this life suddenly click for you?
3 points by CallMeV on Nov 2, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments
When did it hit you that coding was not just something you could do, but something you wanted to do - something you could maybe see yourself doing all the days of your life, or maybe the thing that will earn you your PhD or get you into the corner office of your own business empire?

How did that first moment of epiphany feel? Did it come like a shiver down your spine when that compiler ran through your code without errors that first time? Did you look at what you had just done, and think "I can make so much money from this?"

They say that, like the first kiss, you never forget your first time. So spill.




not a coder, but a businessman. it was the night i opened the doors of my retail store for the first time and 25 people walked in and started playing cards and buying stuff from me. i knew in that moment that there was no way I'd ever go back to working for anyone else again.


I shifted pretty gradually (from elementary school to high school) from being mostly interested in biology to mostly interested in coding (and later to math and computer science). I don't think I really thought of software as a career until 6th or 7th grade. By 9th or 10th, I wasn't really thinking much about biology any more (though I still had enough interest to enjoy biology class junior year), and I was starting to be exposed to computer science.


I could say it was when I was doing my work experience in College and stayed on an extra 2 hours to get my code to work. When it did work, I was extremely happy. I realised then that I should be doing more of this.


learning basic economics, applying the ideas of opportunity cost to myself, and understanding my own valuation system and feeding it back into my decision making process. It's pretty methodical, but not stalling on decisions or opportunities helps keep the momentum going.


I grew into it, started young. First saw the salaries I could command for my passion, then I saw that I could do my own thing and make out even better doing what I love.

Serendipity. I could've loved carpentry and I'd have been boned, economically I guess.

I'm grateful for what I have.




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