I started off messing around in HTML when I was 10. A few months later I decided that I wanted to have a dynamic websites so I moved to PHP & did a whole lot of DB-related stuff - 'because it was cool'. Kept working on my PHP skills and general tech skills until I was comfortable enough to do Desktop coding and made some cool applications with VB6. Then later I moved into Java and C/C++, LUA, Python, etc..

Low level programming being my main interest, but I love reading and working in pretty much every language. Except for ActionScript!)

If you're interested in doing programming, I think the key element to having the learning drive is to work on stuff that you like.

As for, what are some things that I wish I knew before I started. Well - primarily being the fact that you can't learn everything there is to programming.