After graduating from electrical engineering, I figured out that if I wanted to go into electronics, I would need to spend a lot of money on equipment just so I could practice at home, but I was broke. However, my computer at the time was pretty top notch (486DX 50MHz, 16 MB RAM). I felt that my computer was probably the same caliber as the ones that real programmers were using, so it made more sense to learn how to program.

I basically had no real experience programming until I graduated. I took 2 programming courses in undergrad, one being an assembly language course, and I did a summer internship where I did some Matlab scripting to print out graphs. My 4th year project was using a DSP chip to write an FFT in assembly. So while unemployed I taught myself C++ programming, as well as IT administration and networking. My first job was as an IT guy, but I spent every night after work programming, writing utilities and digital audio filtering utilities using FFTs. Within 2 years, I got a job programming after lying on my interview about my previous job experience and I've been programming ever since.