My First Programming Job

Math class was never the same after this discovery

My first paid programming job was for a toasted pb&j sandwich.

I was reminded of how I learned to program by getting a rare chance to help my daughter with the quadratic formula. (I always want to help with math but my kids insist on being independent and learning things on their own, go figure!)

It was my junior year of high school. The 25 or so honors kids of my 500 person graduating class had lobbied for the school to offer AP Calculus and with this class came a requirement to have a graphing calculator. I put aside my trusty scientific calculator and embraced the graphing calculator with the large screen, calculation history and graphs that would have a visual delay to plot.

Inside the package was a book sized manual. At one point I ran out of books to read and for some strange but fateful reason I picked up the manual and read it cover to cover. There was a section near the end about programming with BASIC. They showed how to make cool visualizations and simple programs with user input. I carefully entered each program with the awkward input mechanism. Soon I had little solvers for the Pythagorean theorem, quadratic formula and a visualizer for Riemann Sums.

Word got round our small group of nerds. Everyone wanted my programs on their calculator. One person even had the link cable, which was a game changer for calculator to calculator transfers. At first I gave the simplest programs away for free. I asked if others wanted to see how it was done, they didn't. But people did want more programs and they wanted changes. I told them I didn't have the time and they raised the stakes by offering items from their lunch. The grilled pb&j one person had sealed the deal. It became the standard rate for requests. Soon the quadratic equation solver could show each step in the process.

Members of the group went on to become doctors, dentists, lawyers and a few engineers. I stuck with technology and expanded my toolbox. Now we have AI models with billions of parameters that can do things that are nearly impossible with conventional programming approaches.

How did you get your start in technology?