0. I think my original idle interest was watching my cousin build simple games with Basic and HyperCard. We were both around 10 I think? This was all unknowable

0. I think my original idle interest was watching my cousin build simple games with Basic and HyperCard. We were both around 10 I think? This was all unknowable magic to me. 1. In high school I was recording music and wanted to share it with the world. There was nothing like SoundCloud yet. So I built my own site. I started with Dreamweaver… 2. My then girlfriend decided to learn HTML and rebuild her personal site. I thought that was cool as heck and did the same. 3. I got tired of manually updating HTML, learned enough PHP and SQL to hobble together a basic content-driven template system. 4. By this point I was interested in programming for its own right, but continued to iterate on my own site until I had effectively built a more general purpose CMS. (It was super cool for the early oughts! It had in-situ design agnostic content editing) 5. That landed me my first programming job, with a company making their own custom CMS. This was basically brochureware work for a few years. 6. A buddy and previous coworker asked me to do a quick 2 week contract rebuilding a marketing website for the startup he was at. 7. They liked me so much they kept me on full time. I eventually led their frontend team, gradually moved backend and wound up designing distributed systems for their cloud integrations.