Oh, I also forgot to mention that I write all my research papers in LaTeX; as it's just a markup language, I'm not sure how much it helps with programming concepts. So, I guess I have more than a little programming experience, but still far from a lot.

The most involved programming project I undertook back when I knew web programming was an online file sharing platform for my college during my freshman year. Since everyone at my school had a unique IP mapped to (yourname.dorm.school.edu), I authenticated via that and your school email address. Then, you could search through my roommate's music/movie collection that was close to 500GB (big at the time). All the files/user info/hashed password/site activity were stored locally on a SQL Server database. Within a few weeks we had roughly 2,500 users (school population was around 3,500 students), and there was a few TB of daily traffic. The administration's IT department found out, but since our service apparently decreased the amount of external traffic by a significant percentage, they didn't shut us down until a trustee found out. The funny part was that, because of the authentication, it was somewhat difficult for them to login to prove what was going on (as reported by a friend who worked for them). It was also useful for meeting new people, as we would just go and look at their download history and then sparked up a conversation based on their music/movie/tv interests.

This was all hacked together in ASP/VBScript/SQL. I wish I started learning Python back then! So, yeah, I didn't mean to imply that I started from a zero knowledge base. Some of my academic work, though non-STEM, involves mathematical logic, which perhaps helps in terms of how to think programmatically.