I started with programming lessons after school, I was 13 and that was 1990. I had a ZX Spectrum at home and I could write basic, so that was the beginning for

I started with programming lessons after school, I was 13 and that was 1990. I had a ZX Spectrum at home and I could write basic, so that was the beginning for me. After that it was mostly self-learning, specially reading other's people code (back then, CD-ROM included in magazines were gold). During my time at the university (CS degree) I learnt interesting things, but I think it was equivalent to reading good code. My professional career started when I was 19 I think, just after my first year in university. So that was 6 years after starting programming, but to be fair I didn't have a "proper" computer until I was 18 (before that I did mainly gwbasic and cobol because my 80188-compatible PC didn't have HDD and I had to swap diskettes three times to compile a C program). After I bought my first "modern" PC, it was like each month was equivalent to a year of learning compared to my previous experience. Something like that happened again when I got Internet connection at home, circa 1998.