When I was in middle school my brother started playing half-life 1 followed by counter-strike. This got me into playing counter-strike, and then eventually damn

When I was in middle school my brother started playing half-life 1 followed by counter-strike. This got me into playing counter-strike, and then eventually damn near all other half-life mods. This just generally helped my computer literacy as eventually I would learn how to mod existing mods. Slowly I started to come to terms with the idea that I too could build things like the half-life community had done. I bought myself a huge book on C++ and went through it about 3 times. Then bought another 2 C++ books and started making small projects (tic tac toe, pong, game of life, tetris, etc). I decided that I'd probably enjoy doing it as a career. I went into web development because that seemed like the path of least resistance. I always had a peripheral understanding that Linux was a thing, but I tried out Ubuntu briefly in 2012 and ended up breaking the install due to my unfamiliarity with it. In 2013 I was applying for jobs and one of them had a requirement for you to download a git repo, make a few changes, and then submit a pull request. While doing this my laptops hard drive died. Fortunately my laptop had two drives -- one was a 20 gig SSD which housed Windows (this one died), and one was a 500 gig drive which housed all the data. I had a deadline by which I had to submit the change, so I decided to install Linux (Mint this time) on the working drive and continued from there. I ended up liking Linux Mint a lot, it's what all my devices still use today.