I’ve been programming in one form or another for decades. I learned to type at the age of 3, and spent weekends being babysat by a PDP-10. In our house, punch cards were the 1970s equivalent of Post-It notes.
In my teens I began experimenting with addictive substances, the result being that I would have difficulty keeping a steady job and money in my pocket for most of the rest of my life. I started out with the cheap stuff, Vic-20, which was a gateway to more powerful things: C-64, then Apple //e. That kept me happy a while, but then I cleaned up my act for a few years, within the oversight of a government program.
Toward the end of that time I got my hands on PC, and then found Turbo C, with which I spent many weekends experimenting. Once the government released me from the program, my life started spinning out of control, drifting from one job to another, with menial duties: I did Windows, I did Perl and Ruby diving, I served Java, and I ladled out alphabet soup: C, UNIX, SQL, XML, HTML, CSS.
Among my favorites hobbies is squash. The vegetable, not the sport.
