I was eight years old, and wanted to make a Pokemon fan site, so I purchased a book to learn HTML, and used "view source" on every website I could find. I ende

I was eight years old, and wanted to make a Pokemon fan site, so I purchased a book to learn HTML, and used "view source" on every website I could find. I ended up copying and pasting some Javascript that I wouldn't be able to understand for another 6 years. At fourteen I became interested in "serious" programming and bought a copy of Visual Studio along with a C++ book. I was mostly interested because I read online that C++ was challenging. At seventeen I took an interest in Linux, and started using that full time realizing I could have saved myself from spending literally all my money by using an open source C++ compiler. At 21 I finally found myself in a Computer Science undergraduate department. Somewhere along the way I started building PCs, but my interest was always more on the software side than the hardware side.