I had a non-technical management role and a business need that could only realistically be met with software. I had no budget and company policy prohibited purc

I had a non-technical management role and a business need that could only realistically be met with software. I had no budget and company policy prohibited purchasing or commissioning software anyway. So I thought "how hard can this be?", took a laptop home and taught myself to code. I started in BASIC because that was bundled with the laptop. I quickly became aware of its limitations and moved to C (working in DOS back in 1990). From there I became the company's go-to person for glueware. We had a dozen silo'd systems that all had some form of file or COM port based I/O, and I was soon proficient at getting them to talk to each other. Six years after I wrote my first line of code I hung up my management lunchbox and became a fulltime software engineer.