1) Self taught from breaking stuff and trying to fix it. Started out creating games in BASIC, then hacked around with PHP and got into writing bespoke plugins f

1) Self taught from breaking stuff and trying to fix it. Started out creating games in BASIC, then hacked around with PHP and got into writing bespoke plugins for a phpBB community. I also wrote a few patches for OpenTTD and learnt some C doing that. Next I got "The RSpec Book" and learnt about testing and Rails. I then went and did a CS degree, however I feel it didn't really give me anything I didn't already know - I have never needed to know what a red-black tree or hill climbing is in my professional life, although I'm sure if I didn't do it I would regret it [0]. After that got a proper job doing Rails and learnt a lot more from working with others. 2) 2002 3) 2009, although if I didn't do three years of university it would have been sooner. EDIT: [0] I think university is also good for life experience, and I still think it holds true that most companies (even non super-mega-corp) prefer people to have degrees.