It is hard for me to give any advice here as I learned by being a kid. I was lucky enough to have an uncle who handed us down an Amiga 500. It came with a few g

It is hard for me to give any advice here as I learned by being a kid. I was lucky enough to have an uncle who handed us down an Amiga 500. It came with a few games. And we received right at the tail end of a push to teach every kid programming in the late 80s. So I had heaps of Compute! magazines and books on BASIC from the library. Back then games were expensive and computer programming was, I think, a lot more accessible. Learning how to make your own games seemed almost like a natural thing to do with a computer in that environment. So that’s what I did. I went from BASIC and assembly to C to make games for the Amiga and later DOS. I eventually picked up some Perl later on after the “Internet” came out. I even dropped out of high school for a year to make a ton of money building websites with it in the 90s. The crash happened, I finished school a year later than my mates. Brief interlude in my early twenties to play in bands, learn music production, start a record label, and fail at that before giving up and take up making websites to make a buck. I remained self taught. I never really stopped programming. My record label was supposed to be this subscription service online that let you stream and share as much of the catalog as you wanted and get dibs on merch, tickets, secret shows, etc. I built a good bit of it myself. I just kept going. Programming is something that I had a knack for, an interest in, and I guess the focus and discipline to learn more and more as I went. These days I enjoy formal methods, hacking around in Haskell, I still build things in C and assembly to make games for old retro consoles or whatever. If there is any advice in this rant I guess it’s: follow your nose. If you like programming you’ll find a way to stick through it.