I built my first computer when I was in middle school so I could play video games. I thought the people who hung out on Slashdot were pretty cool, so I decided

I built my first computer when I was in middle school so I could play video games. I thought the people who hung out on Slashdot were pretty cool, so I decided to learn Perl so I could build my own website, because that's what people talked about doing. It turned out to be harder than I thought. I never figured out how to actually build a CGI (and in retrospect, I was pretty far from understanding how the web really worked) but I managed to learn a little something about programming. I remember writing Perl programs to do my math homework for me. I gave up on learning more Perl because I was working through a book (llama book I think?) that had three chapters in a row devoted to regular expressions. I couldn't get through all three. I got into Linux when Ubuntu Breezy Badger and I read that it was an "idiot proof" version of Linux. Spent way too much time copy and pasting commands from forums over the next few years but I remember having a lot of fun with Compiz.