Setting aside that I don't know if I would count myself as a success in programming (my career has been mostly in ops, though my latest role has me writing more

Setting aside that I don't know if I would count myself as a success in programming (my career has been mostly in ops, though my latest role has me writing more code), I think the main forces that got me here are sheer dumb luck and the happenstance of delighting in the right technology. The only reason I got started with *nix is because when I was about 10 I saw some network news piece on this wacky Finnish guy who was making his own version of Windows with his friends because he thought Bill Gates, who was in charge of Windows, was lame (I'm sure it said something else, but this is what my child brain got from it). Basically I didn't get into Linux and the BSDs because I was a Unix fan (how could I be, if my only computing experience until that point was Apple iis at school and a few months of having our first PC running Windows 98?) but because I was drawn to the radical politics (though I definitely wouldn't have phrased it this way) of making your own free thing to compete with the richest guy in the world's expensive thing. When I learned that Id had released the source code to Quake under an open source license (the same one as Linux even!) too, I begged my parents for a book about C so I could understand it (though I never succeeded). From them on, I was a computer hobbyist and free software ideologue and consequently became quite fluent in shell, Perl, and PHP, but I never even contemplated doing any of that as a career until I was laid off from work in another field and a few (jobless) weeks later saw a billboard advertising Linux admin jobs. I called and they hired me, and I accepted gladly because I was newly-married and broke (and my wife wasn't working at the time either). My career progression since then has been a little more deliberate, but that initial spark was really because my pre-adolescent brain liked the idea of getting one over on Bill Gates. In short, I was lucky to be interested in this soon-to-be-lucrative thing as a child, so that when I really needed a job I could "fall back" to it.