I started writing out the whole story, but in a nutshell: my formal background is a dual EE/CompSci bachelors, followed by an Masters in CompSci that focused on distributed systems. When I was a kid, I learned to program very young: Basic around 8, C in DOS around 11, C on Linux around 13. I fiddled with electronics some, but didn't really get it. I took the EE part of my schooling specifically because I wanted to learn more about how computers worked "under the hood" so to speak.
From there, I ran a web consultancy for a while, and ended up with a client that had a more math-heavy project. And then another client showed up with a project where a microcontroller made sense, and then another... My business partner was moving across the country, and I was enjoying what I was working on quite a bit more than I was in the web/mobile space, so we decided to part ways. I still do the occasional web/mobile project, but they're generally hardware-related (e.g. the Bluetooth connectivity portion of an IoT-type system). Over the years I've accumulated probably $15-20k worth of equipment and software license, and the customers keep showing up!