I started doing database work in my mid-late 20s. 27. I had a certain girlfriend who didn't care for my itinerant lifestyle and the ups and downs of being a performer. She wanted me to get a "real" job. I've always been fond of technology, but never a hacker. I messed with a lot of hardware when I was a kid; worked for the hardware repair shop at university when I was in school. Did a lot of troubleshooting, but never any code. I read a couple of books about databases, built some toy applications, and completely lucked into a job with a market research company. They were desperate for someone who could query their db on the fly and work with MR people to do ad hoc reporting. So I did that. Later, I got more into the research aspect of the data I was working with, and moved to the analytics team. It was a good match.

Went back to school for statistics, stayed in the market research industry for a while but I got tired of grinding through stuff in databases all the time. I learned some Python for a couple of things, and now I'm at a payments processing company (not one of the big ones that sometimes get talked about here). Still fairly heavy on the DB end of things, but doing a lot of Python and C#. Python for AI on our transaction data--and anything else I can get away with using it for, C# for building reports of various different kinds. SQL Server for all the DBA needs.

I'm not looking to move jobs (this one is really too good to quit at this point in my career), but I am looking for part time python web dev work so I can get some experience there. That's where I want to be in 5 years, but I don't want to have to start over as a junior developer to get there. I've got plenty of free time, and I'd love to do 20-30 hours a week for a shop that could offer some mentoring to someone like me. And some cash. But the mentoring is more important.

Thanks for asking, by the way. I appreciate it.