My parents got me an BBC Micro (Model B) when I was about 10 years old. The instruction manual had programming examples in it and I started off copying things o

My parents got me an BBC Micro (Model B) when I was about 10 years old. The instruction manual had programming examples in it and I started off copying things out of the user manual. [1] I took a computer science course in high school and learnt Pascal. I wrote a dinghy sailing (racing) management program when I was 17. I created a windows style GUI using ACSII codes. It worked quite well. I went to university and was taught C++. I hated it. I wrote some C and Delphi during that time as well. By the end of university I wanted nothing to do with computers. For me, Computer Science in university was a disaster. I took two years away from computers and worked in a completely different vertical. A friend got me interested in computers and programming again and I got bitten by the bug again. I learnt some HTML and then got a job at a web agency as a junior trainee. I learnt ASP scripting and SQL. From there I went to work for a big computer company working on their online presence. From there I bootstrapped my own web development agency (which died) and I've been freelancing ever since. When ASP.NET came out I taught myself C#. Soon after Ajax became "the thing" so I learnt JavaScript. Sometimes I have to hack around PHP, Python or Java. I sometimes think I should make the jump to Node or Rails, but all of my industry contacts are tied to Microsoft technologies. For the moment I will stay where the work is, and if it dries up then I'll learn something new. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro