> Did you learn to program in school or teach yourself? I dabbled in computer science in college (1999 - 2001), taking 3 programming courses that covered C++ a

> Did you learn to program in school or teach yourself? I dabbled in computer science in college (1999 - 2001), taking 3 programming courses that covered C++ and Java. There was a saying in the CS department that if you took one programming class you could get a programming job. I didn't believe it at the time, but I'll come back to this point. -Did you do unpaid work to establish yourself? Out of school I knew I wanted to get a web design job. I found a small graphic design company that was starting a web department. They had a designer and a programmer and I was the guy that could talk to them both (I had an art background and knew how to "speak programmer"). The company was working in PHP and I remember thinking how crazy it was that I hadn't been taught programming in the context of the web. For what it's worth, the CS program now teaches Python in its programming courses. So while I had a background in programming, I had to teach myself PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JS, server management, etc. But I can't stress enough how much the fundamentals from school helped me. I still run into people who have taught themselves jQuery, but they don't understand the fundamentals of loops, or arrays, or conditionals... -Roughly how long did it take you from day 1 of learning to day 1 of being paid? The web department did not last long in the graphic design company – the leadership just didn't understand the opportunity. Within 6 months I could see the ship was going down, so I took me newly learned skills and started my own web consulting company. Technically I was being paid for programming right out of college -- 2.5 years after first learning how to code. But it was when I received my first check for my own company, 6 months later, that I felt like I was being paid for my coding. -What was your first gig? My first gig was a website for a contractor remodeling my parent's house. It was a lucky first client because after a basic portfolio site, the owner asked if I could build a portal for all of his clients and that changed my focus from portfolio sites to web applications.