I started "programming" in the mid eighties during primary school. I made little games, and made the PC play music and that sort of nonsense. As I got older the

I started "programming" in the mid eighties during primary school. I made little games, and made the PC play music and that sort of nonsense. As I got older the games got more advanced, I even built a simple graphical OS so my parents didn't have to use DOS. Strangely I never considered my hobby as a possible career path. It wasn't until 1997 that I realised I could make a living out of being a developer. At the time I was working in my uncles PC store repairing computers and doing some basic web development stuff (for free) for his customers. One day my uncle introduced me to a guy in his late sixties. He was a farmer that had taught himself to code and had written a piece of software called FarmBase. He wanted my help to update the application for Windows (until then it ran only in DOS). After talking at length he offered to sell me the software for some nominal fee essentially as long as I promised to "do it justice". At that time he was making good coin off the app, but couldn't keep up the maintenance (he was earning 5-10x what he offered to sell it to me for, so I'd make back the investment in 2-3 months). Sadly, I didn't have the money and let the offer pass. The upside is that until that moment I'd never considered "writing code" as something that could be a real career. Not only was I inspired to write code for a living, I was inspired to (eventually) run a software company.