I learned HTML and extremely basic JS in lower school to make basic web pages and kinda-sorta knew how to use browser tools to look into network requests (i.e.

I learned HTML and extremely basic JS in lower school to make basic web pages and kinda-sorta knew how to use browser tools to look into network requests (i.e. cheat on addictinggames type sites) and view page source etc. I started intentionally learning when I got an office job in college and realized that a lot of the boring stuff I was doing would be trivial to automate. After excel formulae stopped being enough for what I wanted to do I went and learned python. VBA would have been the next logical step but after some investigation I found that was a good way to get shanghaied into terrible work forever. I learned initially through Udacity's intro to programming Python course (their original search engine one), and then Norvig's follow on course. After that I started getting better at learning from the documentation and looking up the math and data structures I needed. After I got sick of the office job I was at I did a dev bootcamp to get some kind of credential and to get some webdev experience (all my previous code was data munging, web crawlers, really terrible home grown templating solutions etc). When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail, but code is one hell of a hammer, so I kept coding because there was always more crap I didn't want to do repeatedly. The thing that struck me though was how no one else in that office (filled with quite intelligent people) seemed to see the opportunity before then. This is one of the reasons I wish everyone at least had exposure to coding. It seems rather unfair that previous experience as an addle-brained 8 year making a Pokemon or snowboarding website should have seeded such a relative advantage.