You started before me! I bought a book on PHP the fall of my sophomore year of college. I'd built websites and sorta knew how to create <div> tags and CSS basi

You started before me! I bought a book on PHP the fall of my sophomore year of college. I'd built websites and sorta knew how to create <div> tags and CSS basics, but I'd never dealt with programming logic before. Best decision of my life. I grew up in Birmingham, AL and graduated high school in 2009. Our school didn't offer CS. Nobody's parents were computer programmers. Everybody's parents worked in medicine or law or banking or cooking or something along those lines. Nobody I knew - except for another kid named Robert - knew that programming computers was even a thing that kids like us could do. Robert and I would make stop-motion videos with Legos as kids, played with cameras and video editing and special effects. I think Robert is the only other person in my graduating class of 348 people (348 quite smart people - we had 29 National Merit Finalists our graduating year!) who have learned about programming thus far. I think my high school finally started offering CS last year. For me, I was trying to build an SMS group messaging app (this was before GroupMe or WhatsApp or anything else like that). I couldn't find anybody to build it. The summer of my sophomore year of college, GroupMe had been built and sold to MSFT for $100 million. I decided, "Why can't I learn to program? Then I won't have to find somebody else to make my next idea." I fell in love with programming! The spring of my sophomore year, I also enrolled in CS 101 (I ended up minoring in CS, although reading books and doing online tutorials was far more helpful). The professor, who wrote compilers for IBM for over two decades, said at the start of the class, "You are in the right place. When I showed up at college, I'd never seen a computer before. I went on to have a thrilling 25-year career." Since I imagined everybody else had been programming in their basement since they were 8yo, I was relieved. It's never too late to start something. I wrote this article about collecting sand when I was a kid (which relates to this very topic). It made it to the front page here on HN which I thought was neat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22131552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22131552