1. My first job out of university, when I discovered you can do interesting things with programming. 2. Learning XForms, which can do most of what JavaScript i

1. My first job out of university, when I discovered you can do interesting things with programming. 2. Learning XForms, which can do most of what JavaScript is used for in a tiny amount of code. 3. Learning JetBrains IDEA, the only IDE that I ever enjoyed using. 4. Learning red-green-refactor TDD. Now refactoring is something I do as a matter of routine, not dread. 5. Understanding the fractal complexity of Bash. It's weird how a language can make stream processing and parallelization basically trivial, while making things looping over non-trivial sets of files reliably PhD-level tasks. 6. Doing pair programming, and then keep doing it for four years because it was brilliant. 7. Installing Arch Linux, the first distro where things weren't constantly broken because of version drift.