My mother was a computer science professor and was active with ACM's SIGGRAPH for most of my early childhood, but somehow I got through high school never learni

My mother was a computer science professor and was active with ACM's SIGGRAPH for most of my early childhood, but somehow I got through high school never learning how to write code. I did, however, learn that laziness can sometimes be a virtue. In my second job out of college, I was running the sound board for a national talk radio show. We broadcasted three hours a day, and I was tasked with getting recordings of each day's shows uploaded as a podcast with the commercial breaks edited out. Being far too lazy to want to do this by hand, and recognizing that we broadcasted on a "hard clock" (a commercial break would run every day from 2:06:55 to 2:10:25 for example), I decided it was time to learn how to let a computer do the work for me. Fortunately, a friendly coworker who was a hybrid of broadcast engineer and sysadmin pointed me toward bash scripts and cron jobs. Figuring it all out was a frustrating couple of weeks, but I certainly didn't regret it. A few years later, among other duties, I was responsible for the audio archives of a very old musical organization. Mostly this meant knowing how to make decent transfers of DATs, LPs, 1/4" reel to reels, etc. We found ourselves with over 20,000 tracks of original recordings in .wav format and the metadata about those tracks in an unconnected database. After far too many searches in the library database, followed by finding the desired file by hand, I got busy scripting (and perusing posts on HN that have helped immensely along the way). That project has evolved into a searchable website containing audio, video, photos and print materials of everything in our catalog. Next week, I'm on my way to Silicon Valley to interview for a programming gig at a company doing very exciting things. I definitely didn't see it happening this way, and maybe it's not the best career move for me, but my life wouldn't be the same if I hadn't realized my laziness could be rewarded by learning how to code.