I started out coding on the side when I was a teen. Mostly just building native GUI applications in VB and Java, maybe some scripts here and there. I think it w

I started out coding on the side when I was a teen. Mostly just building native GUI applications in VB and Java, maybe some scripts here and there. I think it was a cool start because we could easily do stuff that worked...things like chat clients over our school LAN, scripts which would pull data/files from somewhere, and send them to the people. Then I studied at University, where I got a more fundamental grasp of how things worked. My first job revolved around industrial automation and such. These days I work in data science / engineering, and I write a lot of "useful" stuff for automating various tasks. It was really fun to automate stuff which freed up around 1000 manhours a week - not really impressive on the mega scale that many FAANG engineers work on, but when the company has xx people working on menial stuff which can be automated, you really do feel a sense of accomplishment.