I don’t remember much from my first few years of programming. My father would bring me the latest issue of “Scientific American”, and I’d avidly read A. K. Dewdney‘s column. Sometimes it would be just reading, as in the case of the caricature algorithm. Sometimes it would be actually putting the pseudo-code walkthroughs into the real Basic code. I might have done a couple of Game of Life and Mandelbrot attempts, but I don’t remember having fun just translating those algorithms into code. Somehow, they were not mine, and I would spend most of the time playing games. Until I got my hands on the Commodore, that would involve putting an audio tape in my small tape player and praying that it would not chew the tape in the middle of the load. “Boulder Dash” was my favorite.

When I was in junior high school, the schedule would have our entire class spend one day a week in an external computer facility. There was no formal training, but rather a random exercise given every week. I remember an exercise to print out the multiplication table, where most of the time would be spent on right-aligning numbers in each column. We spent the rest of the day goofing around and playing Xonix. And then came the final exercise in the senior high school. The teacher had a list of “graduation” projects. Each project would be done by a pair of students, and each pair was free to select any project they wanted. My partner, Maxim, was also my academic “nemesis”.

Our math teacher has introduced the concept of differential in the last few weeks of junior high. The final exam had a few of those, and a bonus question. After solving the regular questions, I’ve spent a what seemed like an eternity trying to crack that bonus question. I failed. After handing out the final scores, our math teacher showed the solution that involved the opposite of differential – integral. He wanted to see who would be able to invent the notion of the integral based on our knowledge of differential. I failed. The other guy, my nemesis? He solved it. Oh well, he was better at math than me.

Back to the final project in the computer lab. Our computer teacher has told me and Maxim that she would be really happy if we were to choose a particular project. I remember that project as if it happened yesterday. It was about scheduling classes, teachers and classrooms. The program would get a list of constraints – the capacity of each classroom, when each class (from a different school) comes to this installation, teacher preferences for days of the week and classes, teacher vacations etc. Then it would print out a few possible allocations of teachers to classes to classrooms to days of the week. Me and Maxim spent some time talking about this, and we had no idea how to do this. She might as well have asked us to write a chess program to beat Karpov. We chose a different project. She was disappointed.

My path after finishing the high school took me to study geodesy and cartography. I’ve spent the next four years studying spherical trigonometry, photogrammetry, general relativity and how it affects the GPS calculations, and more map projections than I ever thought existed. But there was one course that was my absolute favorite. The teacher was a quiet, old, balding gentleman that taught us programming in Fortran 77. It was not general programming, much like the language itself. It was all about implementing efficient solutions to various math problems, like inverting sparse matrices or normalizing spherical harmonics. I didn’t care much about writing clear and clean code. I cared much more about writing clever code. The type of code where I would have four goto statements in three nested loops. The type of code where you would look at it a week after you wrote it and you had no idea how it was supposed to work. You know, fun code. Because the assignments themselves were not fun. They were about implementing the solution, not finding it. The solutions were already found long ago.

I didn’t complete that degree. I dropped out after four years, with one and a half more to go. I knew what I wanted to study, and I knew what I wanted to be. And most important, I knew what I didn’t want to be. Geodesy is an old discipline. The basic principles have been studied and defined in the 19th century. There is not much innovation in the field, or at least not from what I could see. In one of our courses, the very first thing the teacher told us was that we have to buy a pocket calculator that has 12 digits of precision. He said that if we have one of those, we’ll pass his exam. That calculator is still me to serve as a reminder. My work future was going to be dull and unchallenging. And so I dropped out.

I started afresh. I went to study at the computer science department, starting anew. I was only able to transfer three course grades, but it didn’t matter. I knew that I wanted to study programming full time, and I knew that I wanted to be a full time programmer after that.

My first computer course was “Introduction to C”. Unlike my previous ventures into learning programming, that was actual formal education. And in the middle of the semester we were hit with recursion. I confess. I didn’t get it at the beginning. Sure, I wrote down everything the teacher said during that lecture. And then I stared at the home work. The exercise was to read in a definition of a two-dimensional maze and find a path through it. And in the beginning it was the same wall that I hit back then in senior high. And then I read the lecture again, and again, and started actually doing it. Because I wanted to get a good grade. And then I finally got it. “The Matrix” wouldn’t come out for another few years, but I had the Neo moment. I knew recursion.

In the years since I interviewed a few dozen people. My main technical question was always about recursion. I might be biased. I think that you can’t be a programmer if you don’t get recursion. I might be biased because it was this mark of shame that I’ve carried with me since senior high. I might be biased because I was not able to “invent” recursion back then, and I had to be shown what recursion is.

I took a lot of different courses that showed me the limitations of what I get. Past certain point, my brain just seemingly stops functioning. Elliptic cryptography, packet switching, cross-mapping of NP problems, finite automata. I know enough to truthfully say that I know nothing. Sure, I can maintain a dilettante conversation about any of these, but my inner eyes just glaze when I try to read about the recent advances in any of these. But finally getting recursion was the point where I saw myself as a programmer.

Some people will say that I’ve wasted four years of my life studying geodesy. Some people will say that these are the years that I’m never going to get back. But I don’t see it that way. Those are the years that have showed me what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I might have lost them not doing what I loved to do, but that was how I knew what I did love. As Frederick Phillips Brooks says in the epilogue of “The Mythical Man Month”, there are only a few people who have the privilege to provide for their families doing what they would gladly be pursuing free, for passion. I have traded a professional life full of dull moments and unfulfilled potential for a shorter, but much happier one. A life where I look forward to doing what I do every single morning. For as long as I am wanted, and beyond that.