In 11-12th grades I played a lot of card tournaments (mostly Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh) eventually ending up as the one running the competitions for our local groups and learned HTML so I could maintain a simple site with rankings etc. This led to people asking me for tech favors fixing random stuff and eventually into various web projects where I got into CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL, etc.

I started by writing small scripts to automate things, but really got into it after learning how fun it can be to make the computer do stuff. I also see it as a kind of creative outlet, but in general I just want to learn how to fix anything in software if I’m not satisfied with how it works.

I liked computers in general since highschool, felt natural.

Didn’t think that much about the money there or now and IT is slowly becoming bluecolar anyway.

Programming class at school when I was 15. Basic Delphi/object pascal back then. Was always into technology beforehand, especially tinkering with the first android phones, rooting them and installing custom ROMs

I wanted to sell Pokémon ROMs to kids at my school but a lot of them weren’t technical enough to know how to run them. DOS scripts and autorun solved the problem.

Interacting with something consistent and deterministic while growing up in a crazy, random world. Also power. Power over my computer minions.

I stumble on a FoxPro tutorial book when I was a child and I just can’t wait to try it on computer.

It wasn’t the money, it was the ostracizing. I was bullied mercilessly for years and my only retreat was the inside. Computers were the most entertaining thing, so spending a lot of time on it, made me good at it.

Nobody knows what I sound like, smell like, look like, etc. online. I could delete this account right now and pop up with a new one - to anybody but the admins, it’d be like a new person showed up. Also: I can leave whenever I like.

Semi-related: opensource is great too. If something doesn’t work, I can try and fix it. If the maintainer(s) doesn’t want it/can’t integrate it, a new fork can be created (soft or hard).

Finally, it’s cheap. No need to buy expensive equipment, materials, space, pay teachers, or have a team.

Typing in basic listings from magazines was pretty much the only way to get software.

December 8th, 2009 - Motorola Droid successfully rooted … [granting] root access on the phone using a terminal emulator. This is how I learned bash which inevitably pushed me into pursuing proper Computer Science.

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I wanted to be an animator, specifically for video games. I made all this cool art and animations in flash, but I had no way to show it off in a game setting. So I learned Action Script 2 to make flash games with so that I could show off my animations. Turns out, I suck at art and animation. Oh well! I ended up liking the coding part more anyway.

The worst teacher I ever had assigned me a project to make a game using GameMaker. Been hooked ever since, and eventually turned it into a career.

I think I was 11 or 12 when I started plaxing Tibia (a very early MMORPG). I really enjoyed it. At some point I found out that somebody has leaked the source code. You could host your own Tibia server. You could create new map segments or introduce new quests by Lua scripting. There was a huge community for “Open Tibia”, hundreds of servers with thousands of players. First, I got into mapping, then I got into scripting and loved it.

I dicked around with BASIC in the early 90s and then started CS in high school, where I learned Pascal and it just took off from there.

My father, as a sysadmin with some coding knowledge, got me my first PC, some old tower with a GT 210. I was probably ~5 yo. After moving to a new house (for the fifth time), I got another PC, I think. This one was even older, but with Ubuntu Server it ran perfectly. My father taught me the basics, so cd, mv, nano and init, as we set up a minecraft server together.
A few christmases after that I got a new PC, the old one was promoted to a server and the old server was sorted out (in retrospect, keeping the floppy drive in there would’ve been kinda cool). Then a Pi was welcomed into the room, yet another server, as the old/new one broke, came too, this time it was a HP Mini Tower thingy. A Raspberry pi zero w for testing and stuff got here too.
But since I got the first server, I learned bash, ofc. Through Minecraft I got to Java, vanilla gets pretty boring after some time. Some time after, I decided to switch to Linux fully (I only dual booted Kali (and before someone starts to scream: I actually needed it)), as Windows kept getting buggier and shittier, I chose Pop as a daily driver. This screamed for custom scripting, so Python came to mind. At the same time I was interested in C# and learned it on my phone, because why not.
One or one and a half years ago I got sucked into depression even deeper, so I switched to my love, always, Arch. Going along was the desire to learn something even nerdier, so C/C++. I’m confident to say that I’m good in python, and OK in C#, so why not. Now I even program things sending and parsing web requests in C++, because speed.

TL;DR:
Strong personal interest since I was 10 through Minecraft (Java), Linux (Python), random other languages (C#, Ruby) and speedy languages (C/C++).

Now I see classmates, 18 years old, and of generation TikTok aka. “I press that button and there are pictures now” trying to learn programming. Fine, I guess, but they lack the most basic skill of all: Acquiring knowledge. Every answer needs to be prepared for them, everything else is inquired from ChatGPT.