Marc Köhlbrugge is a successful indie hacker and solo founder who is best known for creating BetaList, which shows promising startups. He also made the WIP community and Tweet Photo which let users automatically share Instagram posts to Twitter. Marc talks learning to code without a CS degree.
How did you learn to code?
Back in the 90s when I was still a little kid we had a computer that booted up in MS-DOS. I taught myself the basic commands like 'cd' and 'dir' to explore the hard drive and play different games that were installed.
There was one particular game that I found very difficult, but I desperately wanted to get my name into the high score leaderboard. Then I figured those scores must be store somewhere and started 'cd-ing' around and found a 'highscore.ini' file.
I never edited a file, but knew the English word "edit" so I tried typing 'edit highscores.ini' and sure enough I was able to see and edit the names and scores displayed in the game. I added my name with probably a ridiculous score, booted up the game, and lo and behold there I was at the top of the leaderboard. That was my "aha!" moment. I realised I could tell the computer what to do.
As I got older I thought I wanted to become a hacker, and started researching it whenever I got a chance to be on the web (this was still in the dial-up modem days). One tutorial explained hackers need to understand programming languages, so I randomly picked HTML and started building websites. Fortunately I didn't end up a true hacker, but the love for programming stuck and I haven't stopped programming since.
