My Developer Origin Story

David Germain
2 min readAug 19, 2020
Photo by anncapictures

The year was 2013. I was attending secondary school. We were learning a formula to solve math problems. It caused a lot of suffering. The formula was long and complex. One little mistake and everything would be wrong.

Eventually, our teacher said there was an easier way. She explained that we could create a program on the calculator that executes the formula. Instead of doing everything manually, we could start the program, input the values, and press enter. The calculator would then give us the answer. Great! Now my calculator could do my homework.

Above is a sample program.

I was intrigued. During the following months, I created more programs to do my homework. A lot of time was spent making them perfect; this was when I learned the basics of programming. The programming language was approachable, it consisted of only a page of commands, so I felt I could learn it all.

Later, I discovered that I could connect my calculator to friends’ calculators and transfer programs to them. Great! Now their calculators could do their homework. I was helping them and it felt satisfying. This was when I realized that being a software developer could be a career for me.

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