Hello, I am a self taught graphics programmer. I started with small games in XNA (I still recommend it to anyone for learning), then experimented with shaders and some terrain rendering (excellent tutorials by Riemers that got me started). My life has changed from that day when I implemented reflective and refractive water from that tutorial and I have been doing graphics programming ever since.

I started learning C++ while also doing DirectX 11 tutorials and creating a fighting game. Then it just grew out to be a full blown game engine and abandoned the fighting game. The engine is now known as Wicked Engine, and is open source.

Thanks to my experience, I could start working at a game dev company as a graphics programmer.

I am fully self-taught for everything i know about programming.

I basically started somewhere around in the ~90 playing around with the C64 and BASIC and switched later to QBASIC on DOS 5.x.
In 1996 i got my hands on borland delphi 2, then upgraded to borland delphi 5 and used this for over a decade.
This was the time where i fully started to learn object oriented programming and low level stuff.

After my mother died 1998 i wanted to challange myself more - so i got into opengl graphics and multimedia programming due to access to online tutorials + samples and books. Even though i had no math knowledge whatsoever i magically created one 3D tech demos after another - insipred by people and games, but without no seriousness in making games.
2003 i successfully finished a 3 years long programming eduction school, with the focus on planning and business shit.
While working professionally all day, i still coded in evenings or on holidays.
Eventually i got into full media programming but with extreme directshow and GDI rendering shit and created one giant project called "Xenorate Media Player". After more then 10 years of actively working on that project, i stopped it around 2011 ~ one year after my daugther was born.

To kill time while my daugther was sleeping a lot, i taught myself math, linear algebra and physics programming and created simulations all over the place. Around 2014 handmade hero was coming out and this started me to getting really interested in game and graphics programming.

Knowing how everything works and creating a full fletched game by myself without relying on others is a dream i have since the very beginning.

A few handful of screens:

@turanszkij Oh that's so cool to see you here, I've just found your videos through my youtube recommendations a few weeks ago !

Back to the topic:
I guess I don't have to show as much as most others here, but I'm currently "working" on becoming a self-taught graphics programmer :)
I've been messing around for 5 month now with the Vulkan API & Photorealistic rendering.
However, I got no experience with the "standard" way of doing video game graphics (that is, rasterization) but rather with Ray Tracing & more specifically Path Tracing since new year.
I'm currently trying to port my CPU Path Tracer to the GPU, when I got time...

I hope to get some small graphics programmer jobs on upwork or similar portals in the near future ;)

@Life Is Good That's so cool even more so because I am not a frequent commenter here. :D

Try and find mentors, people who are better than you who are willing to teach you and help you out. This was something I really craved when I was younger.

Where can you find a mentor online? Not sure people are willing to teach someone their knowledge to some stranger

Yep - me too.
http://www.joealter.com
http://www.facebook.com/joealterinc

 

I just started young, and was taught a lot on the way by people I worked with.
It's a pretty high bar now, but there are tons of learning resources online that didn't exist now.
I'm constantly re-teaching myself, I'm old, it's hard to keep up and have a life ;-)

joe

some of the best people i've worked with are self taught as well, I don't think it's particularly frowned upon if you've got the goods, getting formally trained does provide an easier path to a career though, but if you're an enterprising sort, you'll figure something out.

I find that my lack of formal training does leave some surprising gaps in my knowledge. Language mastery, for example is something that's taught with rigor, problem solving is really not. I have to ask guys around me about squirrely pointer questions that somehow I've managed to evade for 30 years all the time.
 

I'm a self-taugh programmer, but in was easier in my "time", started in 81 with an Apple 2 switched in 88 on an Atari ST, became an official Atari dev on Falcon and TT in 93 and since my first program i only worked on game mostly, Farcry 1, star wars, avatar, rainbow 6, farcry primal, farcry 5, to name a few ;p. Left school at 16, so my math is bad. But thanks to Internet if i need something, i just have to search for what i need. 

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,168167/

And i just started to learn DX11 and get more advanced in shaders.

 

Completely self taught here also. Started out on the C64 in the late 80's. Didn't start learning C++ until 2006, playing with Ogre 3D at the same time. Learning both simultaneously was a hard task as I didn't know any of the concepts of either.

Always being interested in way things tick, I tinkered around with DX9c and have now moved on to DX11. Still learning, but have the basics sorted out.

Here is a screenie of a game I have been working on for the past few years. Been chipping away when I feel like it, which is very intermittent. (Also in C++ and DX11).

 

I'm quite proud of what I have achieved. Each strand of grass is individually animated and looks awesome swaying gently in the breeze.

I'm certainly no guru though. Still learning new things every day. I am a far cry from the masters that help out on the forums here.

I started with AS3 all by myself and as late as at the age of 24, because until that moment everybody was trying to scare me about programming saying that: "To program you have to be a master in mathematics!! It is only for selected geniuses!"(I tried to code one day and all they said to me resulted to be a lie). Then after a month or so, I switched to assembler and there I learned to program for real, all alone again. Then I started to study Java in a university but they kicked me out for reasons not related to my codding skills. After that I started to study in another university this time C# and they kicked me again, no matter I was one of the best students. In those two short periods of studying in universities, they introduced me to HLL. I was shown by teachers about OOP and Unit Testing. Nobody of our teachers was interested in 3D programming and nobody was able to show me how to do it, so I started to learn WebGl and shaders all by myself and it was very challenging to switch to the shaders-way of thinking. It took me one whole week only to realize how interpolation from vertices to pixels is happening without a teacher. But after 6 months, of studying on my own i was able to make this:

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I had to figure out all by myself how shadow mapping and deferred rendering work. It was cool to be the only one in my second school(including the teachers) to be able to do that (they could learn how to do it too if they had interest into it, maybe)
Now I am studying directx12 all by myself again.
My life story is very sad in my own opinion, because without the degree, nobody wants to hire me for nothing. I understand that I need to pass through a specialization process in the company, but even when searching for junior positions, nobody calls never. And my CV is empty-forever-alone... I wish I'd have started to study medicine at the age of 24 instead programming. I would be now working in a clean office looking dirty gangrenas, not codding Pipeline State Objects in the basement of my mother's house (but this is my own experience in life. other ppl may have different happier life stories)