My dad is a software engineer, so it was always around me. He installed Visual Studio 2008 on my childhood laptop. I didn't pay too much attention to programmin

My dad is a software engineer, so it was always around me. He installed Visual Studio 2008 on my childhood laptop. I didn't pay too much attention to programming at this point since I was more distracted by video games. In high school, I got really into JS (for portability reasons). I started learning C in my senior year after my dad gave me a copy of The C Programming Language, which is still on the shelf behind me right now. College is obviously a time for exploration for a lot of people. For me, it was a time of exploration in technology (less exciting then some :p). Learning new things that I loved every single day was such an incredible time for me. It also led to the Dunning-Krueger effect, as I'm sure we've all faced. The beneficial side of that is that I learned the idea of what I didn't know, so I had the ability to go off and explore myself. If I had to pin point a specific moment, I'd probably choose my introductory CS class's final project, which was to implement the client and server for an /r/place clone in JavaFX. Writing server code became fascinating, on top of working with rendering the (very simple) GUI. I just felt like I actually made something that was interesting, both technically and on the surface.