My first program (that wasn't just printing 'you suck' over and over in basic on the C64) was in Turbo Pascal. It used showed how light defracted in different materials using Snell's Law.

It was great.

For my very first interview I was told “write something in php” so I put together a few scripts to parse templated txt files into html and made a little baby version of a cms. Wasn’t exactly scalable or ground breaking but I thought it was cool. But the engineer that interviewed me was like so this imports text files and it took you all afternoon to build it? …didn’t get that job.

So the next one was pretty similar “hey use this language called Sikuli to build something.” Now, I’d never heard of Sikuli but it was basically python so I built a little app that, based on the screen, could offer up context sensitive hotkey chains…kind of like a baby version of Alfred that literally only worked with Microsoft office. But the guy thought it was cool and hired me anyway :)

Went from working in a gas station over night to working in my kitchen or the coffee shop. I thought it was sooooo cool