Phase 1: HTML and modifying other people's javascripts to add terrible animated cursors etc. to my personal page. Phase 2: took a class in high school on Visua

Phase 1: HTML and modifying other people's javascripts to add terrible animated cursors etc. to my personal page. Phase 2: took a class in high school on Visual Basic and learned more on the side so that I could make games with it. Made a couple games with it. Phase 3: took essentially Java Programming 101 at a local community college concurrently with high school, and started to get serious about making games. Phase 4: made about 30 projects in Java—just whatever I felt like working on at the time—games, game engines, an emulator, 3D model loading/animating/rendering library, tools for making content for games. Almost none of these were completely finished but I learned a ton with each, and sort of climbed a ladder with it, trying progressively more difficult things all the time. This lasted ~3 years. Phase 5: got a repetitive strain injury from typing/mousing too much and stopped coding (not completely, but nearly) for several years. Studied mathematics and language more deeply than what school prompted me to previously, somewhat hoping this knowledge would come in handy if I could return to coding some day. Phase 6: decided to work on a major project that I believed would allow me to efficiently write code with motion sensors (thereby avoiding the injury). This ended up being a pretty deep, difficult project that was actually doing something sort of novel in software for the first time, and I learned tons working on it over the next year and a half, primarily about programming languages and architecture (http://westoncb.com/projects/tiledtext http://westoncb.com/projects/tiledtext). Phase 7: I've been writing software professionally off and on for a few years now, still occasionally returning to side projects. I still retain an awareness for areas I can improve, but it's more about using than developing skills now. I've returned to html/javascript after all these years. It's interesting.