What Is A Professional Programmer?
How do people become professional programmers? Many people go the “traditional” path through a computer science or software engineering education and from there into professional programming work. Others become professional programmers by accident. A person writes a small program to help at work, and their workmates say, “Oh great, you can write programs! You’re our programmer now!” Other people start out as hobbyists and follow a less traditional path, not always getting a degree, but clearly wanting to be programmers from the start and working actively towards that goal. I’ve been a hobbyist programmer since I was 6. I wasn’t writing anything amazing back then but I had started writing and soon found it was absorbing most of my time. Since I never really stopped, that gives me 24 years “programming experience” and counting. At first I was into writing computer games. Later people asked me to write programs for them, and sometimes I even got paid. From this I learned that software is
