In the summer prior to my last year of middle school (~2007), I came up with an idea for a website: a restricted and local social-networking site for young stud

In the summer prior to my last year of middle school (~2007), I came up with an idea for a website: a restricted and local social-networking site for young students (my peers, essentially). I spent that summer reading Head First HTML/CSS (a fantastic book, if a bit dated by now), and a book on Javascript. I taught myself PHP, SQL, and Python/Django, also, over the course of that year. That site was never really finished, as by the time I hit high school, almost everyone was using Facebook, and my idea seemed redundant. However, through high school, I kept up on a number of side projects (mostly in Python, and Django where appropriate), and also participated in Google's Code-In (a great experience for a high school student who'd never contributed to anything with more than a few users, so far. Would definitely recommend to anyone at that age interested in CS). That was my first "paycheck", but it hardly counts, as it was only ~$200, made from an organized competition. One of my side projects was a Chrome app that I sold for $5 each, and I made a couple hundred dollars off of that, too. I got my first real job (part-time) when I moved to the Bay Area to go to college studying CS. Conveniently, a startup just off of the campus was looking for a Python/Django dev, and the skills I'd acquired on my own doing side projects were enough that I could dive into a moderately large codebase with a good idea of what was going on (and this was before I'd even started classes). I'm still with that startup now. So, the timeline went something like this: ~2007: taught myself basic programming. 2009-2010: made some money in Google Code-In and selling an app. 2013: went to college, got employed at a startup.