What you say about being surrounded by non-programmers is spot on. The way I got my start (and initial boost of self confidence), I was the only one who knew p

What you say about being surrounded by non-programmers is spot on. The way I got my start (and initial boost of self confidence), I was the only one who knew programming in a small business (about 200 employees). And what I was doing wasn't much, mostly just writing report generator programs using Awk and shell scripts). But it got so much attention that it was like lighting a rocket under my self esteem, enough so that I went on to be proficient enough in C (this is before C++ was mainstream) to code up some fairly interesting projects.