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High school BASIC course in 1981.

Professionally? Never. Programming has always been a hobby, or a tool for the pursuit of other things.

Interesting. When I wrote my first lines, I was excited by possibilities, viewing code as a means to an end. But now, after a year or two, I often identify as a programmer.

I'm not entirely proud of this. It's like a carpenter who favors his tools over the product. A hammer swinger, rather than a home builder.

I think it's OK to be proud of your abilities. The products will come along in time, you will build them, folks will enjoy them, you'll make some money, and then you'll also learn to be glad when they're obsolete and you've moved on to the next thing.

A lot of what I did, as a high school kid in 1981, was to make mistakes and then figure out how to make good of it. What happened to me is that I kinda sat out the explosion of computer science, while studying other things that I was interested in, such as math and physics. While I'm a good "lone wolf" programmer, I know none of the skills or techniques that would allow me to function in a production software development environment. I'm dependent on a real programming team for that kind of work.

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