I remember when I got introduced to programming. I was about 9/10, not sure exactly, I came across some article that taught you how to create a virus using the

I remember when I got introduced to programming. I was about 9/10, not sure exactly, I came across some article that taught you how to create a virus using the windows notepad (lame, I know), turns out the "virus" was just a fork bomb written in ms-batch. I quickly got into the hacker culture, I went into some underground forum where there was a big "ms-batch scene", I have no idea why, but this guys were implementing games in ascii, trojans, interpreters... all in Batch. And so I started learning, Batch is a horrible language, yet pretty simple to learn, in the meantime I heard about this mythical developers who wrote code in C or Python, languages I thought inaccessible and extremely complex. I remember my first "big" project, I wrote some kind of graphical adventure where you were a "hacker" trying to "hack" into someone's PC by using commands such as "ping" and "telnet" (I had no idea about system administration or pentesting at the time). Thinking about that horrid code, take in mind this was Batch, so no private variables, no functions, no structs... just an endless pile of GOTOs. This is even more funny considering that this was 5 or 6 years ago, in a time where Python, Ruby and Javascript were a thing, I could have gone the easy way, but I took the side-path... and I'm glad. I am now 16, I still have a lot to learn yet I've also learnt a lot. I do consider myself a hacker, just because I write code for fun and like reinventing the wheel when possible. But the definition of "hacker" is very wide, for me, a "hacker" is everyone who enjoys writing code, maybe they work 8-17 writing Java in the Enterprise, but, if you enjoy what you do, if you come back home and keep writing code, if you want to improve: then you are a hacker.