I started by reading the source code of Amazon.com's homegrown internal customer service tools when I worked there in the 1990s. Those were written in Perl. The

I started by reading the source code of Amazon.com's homegrown internal customer service tools when I worked there in the 1990s. Those were written in Perl. Then bought a book on C and started fiddling with that. I wrote CGI scripts in Perl for paying customers in the late 1990s, then was lucky enough to move into a small company with some top-notch programmers who taught me to write more reliable, maintainable code. The best lessons I learned early in my career came from having to maintain my own code in production for years on end. You learn not to cut corners and to avoid convenient hacks when you have to maintain the code. You take the long view in your design, aiming to prevent problems you now know how to anticipate. You seek and implement best practices, because dealing with problems in live systems is no fun at all. There's an old saying: Always code as if the person who will maintain your code is a violent psychopath who knows where you live. When that person is you, you learn your lessons. The systems I wrote early on helped researches run studies on human subjects. Later systems helped digital archivists preserve materials at multi-terabyte scale.