I started with BASIC out of books and magazines on an Apple ][e when I was in 3rd grade. My mother was (still is, actually) a software engineer in the aerospac

I started with BASIC out of books and magazines on an Apple ][e when I was in 3rd grade. My mother was (still is, actually) a software engineer in the aerospace industry so I had a lot of help getting started. Later, I moved on to Amos on the Amiga and then C (Turbo C on DOS at first) on the PC during middle school/high school. The web came along at some point during this and I started in on Perl and HTML. Got a proper CS education at college :) and after graduating went into the Army for 4 years (this was back in 2002). After that, got into the aerospace/defense industry doing C++ and Ada. Later, moved over to more IC-flavored work mostly in Java, with some Scala and Clojure mixed in. These days, I'm out of government work doing Clojure all day in fintech. Still learning to program. The meaningfulness of my work has varied over the years :) I've tried to spin up various side projects (both open source and not) but have not been very successful at creating anything with staying power.