Building for the Joy of Building

My path into coding wasn’t straightforward, it didn’t start with formal education or learning from friends or family. I got some limited access to the internet in my teens and, like many of us back then, I was introduced to HTML through services like Angelfire, where I could set up a website with blink tags and way too many animated images. It took a while to take, though. I had some classmates in high school who took classes in programming and got into C. I gotta say, I was not impressed. I even remember saying I wasn’t interested, when they were trying to convince me how cool this was. I categorically stated I would never be interested in something like this. It wasn’t until my early 20s, when my dad wanted a website for his business, that I started to take my first real steps into programming. It started out with a basic website, some HTML and CSS. I bought some basic O’Reilly book and taught myself enough to get it up and running. And just like that I was hooked. Because now that…