I started coding because I like to make useful things. I took vocational electronics in high school, and I REALLY liked digital circuit design, so my teacher re

I started coding because I like to make useful things. I took vocational electronics in high school, and I REALLY liked digital circuit design, so my teacher recommended I take a programming class. Programming was taught in turbo pascal on machines that had no hard drives, only large floppy disks ('94). I picked it up very quickly, and made my mom (a teacher herself) a grading program she could use to manage student's grades, wrote a couple of screensavers, all in turbo pascal. I then delved into C++, and started learning unix, and learned to write system utilities and scripts as well as basic sysadmin stuff. I took some time off of school to work as a touring musician, but when I went back to college (as a CS major), I needed a job, so I got a job at Glaxo Wellcome because I was a capable sysadmin who could manage the DEC boxes they used for development, and I could also code. I did a bunch of things for them in C, then perl, then finally java after it was out. I'm coming up on 20 years of working as a professional programmer, and I still love to code as much as I did back in high school. I've had various executive roles over the past 8 years, but I've never moved away from coding. It's one of the great joys of my life.