Tim Sweeney: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah, the friction and the pain is the guide to learning in programming. If I were to describe programming journey that’d be marked by pain and that pain, you shouldn’t escape the pain. The pain is instructive for you to understand programming languages. But do you remember what kind of stuff you were writing at that time? Just the early programs? Yeah. In the early days, I wrote a little bit of everything. I wrote some games. The first game I wrote on the Apple II was, since I only knew how to program in text mode, the computer would throw asterisks across the screen, they’d flow from left to right, and you’d have a parenthesis on the right-hand side of the screen and it looks like a baseball mitt and you’re supposed to catch the asterisks. That was my very first game. It took about a couple hours to build and tune, and I went from there. But I built a lot of things. I built databases at different points. I built a programming language and a full compiler for a language like Pascal because I didn’t know where you went to buy one of those. So I made my own. And one of fun things at that time was bulletin boards. Before we had the internet in the hands of consumers, you used your modem and you dialed into a local phone number and connected to whoever was running the computer there. And every town or city had hundreds of these bulletin boards run by different people with their own personalities and themes. And so I spent a lot of time building a bulletin board program and learning how to deal with database management and user interface and dealing with multiple users concurrently and things. And so, I don’t know, I’d probably spend about 10 or 15,000 hours writing code just on my own as a kid between age 10 and age 20 before I actually shipped a program to the outside world. 10 to 15,000 hours. What was the value of the hours as a kid you put in in programming that led to the success you’ve had in later life? Maybe this is by way of advice to younger people in terms of how they allocate the hours of their early life.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.