It was the turn of the century. Internet streaming radio was the new thing. You needed an expensive server to host it ($100+/month). I was a teenager with no mo

It was the turn of the century. Internet streaming radio was the new thing. You needed an expensive server to host it ($100+/month). I was a teenager with no money that wanted to run an internet radio station. So I figured out how to hack together a perl CGI script that statelessly ran a stream, so I could put it on a cheap webhost ($5/month). One script to receive data and write it to temporary files, and the other to stream it to listeners, stitching together the temporary files, and deleting old ones as needed, etc. I had to learn to think about concurrency, locking, etc. I abused the fact that renaming a file is atomic :-) So yeah, being a kid and being able to get something that normally costs $100 for only $5 was an amazing motivator