I think I owe both of my brothers for getting me into programming.

From as long as I can remember I've liked and been interested in gaming. Grew up playing the original Nintendo at my Grandmother's house, and random computer games that my father got from his friend at work who I now realize pirated everything he had. Eventually my brother bought the game Half-Life 1 to play the mod Counter-Strike. I must have been in the 5th grade at the time, and I thought the game was pretty cool so played it whenever I could.

A few months later I walk downstairs and find my brother and his friend playing another Half-Life 1 mod, this time a Dragonball Z game by the name of Earth's Special Forces. I decided to try it out and I became hooked. I eventually wanted to make changes to the game, which I learned you could do by downloading models / sounds / whatever and placing them in the proper folders on the computer.

Eventually I checked out other Half-Life mods, and there were quite a few of really high quality. It all got me interested in creating things on the computer. I realized that Counter-Strike, ESF, and all of the other mods which I played were just made by ordinary people in the community and that there was nothing stopping me from doing the same if I wanted. I always had this thought in the back of my mind, but I honestly didn't think I was smart enough, and I certainly wasn't motivated enough to give it a go until I got to college. I was in college and wasn't sure what I wanted to do with my life. Decided to take a programming class and see what it was like, but unfortunately the only programming class offered was some nonsense Build Websites with HTML course, and it just wasn't at all interesting to me. They were teaching us to build websites using tables and frames from a book that was probably straight out of 1997, and I just didn't find it interesting. I wanted to make games, not format with HTML and CSS to get text and images to look nice on a screen. I just didn't consider it programming.

I decided to learn on my own. I met a lot of really cool people through all of the Half-Life mods that I played, and one of the guys that I talked with a lot was a programmer. He told me the book that he picked up which got him started. I bought it from Amazon and spent the next year bashing my head against the wall trying to understand C++ with no background knowledge. I guess hindsight is 20/20, but I remember reading that book between classes like I was studying for some test or something. It should have been a cue for me that I should major in Computer Science, but I didn't. I think I managed to build a good foundation, but I never considered it more than a new hobby.

I ended up getting an associates degree from that school, because I couldn't make up my mind on what I wanted to do as a career. From there I decided to try my hand at Stenography thinking I could be a Court Reporter. The school met twice per week, and you were expected to practice in your spare time in order to reach the skill required to graduate. I never practiced in my spare time, though. I was unnaturally good at Court Reporting and the two times per week was more than I needed since I ended up graduating ahead of schedule. This all meant that I had a lot of free time during school, though, and what I ended up doing with it was practicing more programming and getting better at it. I tried other languages, started more complex projects, and was starting to really like programming. I think initially I programmed not because I enjoyed it but because I wanted to produce a result, usually a small game or project. Programming was an evil necessity. When I was learning to be a Stenographer it started to be an enjoyable part of the process.

So I graduate as a Stenographer and intern for a bit. Work was hard to find and everyone I talked to in the field had some sort of wrist or body pain they were dealing with from the work. I decided that I'm not making any progress finding a job, and I wanted to avoid a future where my job destroys my body. I figured I'm still pretty young so if I wanted to make a career change that was the time. My other brother suggested I check out a coding bootcamp as he knew a guy who did one and had success with it. Registered and applied for Dev Bootcamp, got accepted, and went through the program for that. It was a Ruby and Rails course, so I got experience with things that were completely out of my element from what I had been doing up to that point. I know a lot of people look down on coding bootcamps, and I think the value you get out of them is definitely dependent on where you're at personally, but for me it was pretty good I think.

After graduating from there, the same brother who recommended I check out the program was able to get me interning at his company, and from there they hired me on after a few months.