I spent about five years working as a graphic designer (both parents were designers with home offices that they encouraged me to use as a teenager) before I rea

I spent about five years working as a graphic designer (both parents were designers with home offices that they encouraged me to use as a teenager) before I realized it was a relatively difficult and unappreciated profession considering the average salary. At the time (I was about 24, 2004-ish) I was working closely with a team of java developers and I knew I was capable of doing what they did, so I just eavesdropped on all of their technical conversation and looked up the terms I couldn't understand. I had to do some flash work as part of my job, so I picked up some actionscript, read a bunch of materials on OOP freely available from Sun Microsystems at the time (not very high quality compared to what is available today). I stopped drinking, stopped going out on the town, and started coming home every day after work and reading everything I could find on actionscript and javascript, and building portfolio apps. I kept telling everyone I worked with that I was learning programming and eventually someone referred me to a small design agency that was looking for a junior developer. They ended up growing fairly rapidly with a lot of clients in the Seattle startup community, and that exposed me to the network that I still get my work from today. My first year there was hellish and I often had to sleep under my desk as I tried to keep up with client deadlines while learning on the job, but I eventually gained some proficiency and the rest is history. It has been my life's passion ever since, and I shudder to think how my life would have turned out if I hadn't taken that leap. I hope that I can have children and teach them everything I know about computers some day. Edit: I probably wouldn't have been exposed to half of the stuff I now know if it weren't for HN, which I consider one of the treasures of the internet.