This is where I had my first taste of programming and it taught me many of the basic concepts, like if statements and variables. With it, you could automate, change, and design all sorts of things related (and unrelated) to your IRC experience. How this ties into programming is the proprietary scripting language that mIRC provides. I don’t recall exactly when or how, but I ultimately began using an IRC client called mIRC. I still can’t look at social media without thinking of IRC channels. Not unlike Slack, IRC is a communication protocol that allows you to connect to various servers that housed channels (chatrooms, usually named for their topic, such as #guitar), prefixed with what we commonly call hashtags these days. After losing access to baked in AOL chatrooms, I discovered IRC: Internet Relay Chat. How this lead to an interest in programming came after we had outgrown our internet beginnings and moved on to a more traditional internet provider without the AOL gatekeeping. There was nothing else quite as wonderous as that. At 12 or 13 years old, I was having conversations with people across the country and the world from the comfort of a desk chair in my own home. The greatest of these wonders to my younger self was the chatrooms. The internet was, of course, ripe with wonder and knowledge at our fingertips. My family jumped into the early internet the same way a lot of people did: with an AOL trial disk. The catalyst for my interest came even earlier than that, though.

As a teenager, I had a Visual Basic text that was thicker than a phone book. I have briefly dabbled with languages here and there my whole life. I completed an associate’s degree in web development back in 2012 but never followed through with the field. But this is far from the first time I have dipped my toes into the development and programming pool. Now in my 30s, I have recently started on my career change path with Bloc, a coding bootcamp. How chatrooms introduced me to programming.

Mirc guitar color codes