How programming slowly took over my life

In a good way

The Early Days

I was introduced to computers at the early age of 7 (OK, fine, maybe early for 90’s kids).

My family was gifted a “broken” computer that only came with a keyboard, and had no other interface other than a MS-DOS command-line terminal.

My brother and I played around in the terminal with commands. I don’t remember how we figured out what commands to use, but it was probably a lot of trial and error.

“I picked things up, just in proximity to it all.”

I want to emphasize that I wasn’t the computer kid; my brother was. As siblings often do, we naturally partitioned ourselves into areas of talent. I was the sporty / artsy one, while my brother took the title of computer geek (sorry, bro). And rightfully so.

Throughout the next 10 years or so, he spent way more time learning and building things out at the computer, while I wasn’t as interested. Still, though, in this environment, I picked things up, just in proximity to it all.

In middle and high school, my brother built websites from scratch. I’d sit with him and watch him adjust CSS / HTML, and took mental note of how the syntax worked, at a high level.

But even then, I never thought of programming as an actual job. I don’t think the school system thought so either. On my elementary school career quiz, I matched with “aerospace engineer”. Software engineer wasn’t even on the list (btw, right now, there are 14x more software engineers than aerospace engineers).

By the time college rolled around, I still didn’t know how to get an airplane off the ground (and yes, I tried to build one multiple times), but I could already play Bach pretty well (I practiced a LOT). So, I took the obvious route and went to college for music.