One of my tweeps @mjeaton has asked his sphere of influence to follow on to his post on the same topic, so here we go.

How old were you when you started programming?  The first time I was exposed to programming was around age 10, someone introduced me to BASIC on an Apple IIe in 1987. I don't really remember what we did, as I was interested more in getting back to the game I was playing. This is probably indicative of why I'm not an alpha geek.  All the alpha geeks quit playing games on their C64 in favor of writing opcodes for it.  The first time I got into it for longer than a 5 minute session was when I was 12.

How did you get started in programming?  In 7th grade a couple of friends and I decided we wanted to write a video game, a medieval RPG. We checked out books on BASIC in the library. None of us had a computer. We wrote the game on paper. Couldn't tell you how many lines of code it was, but it was several spiral-bound notebooks worth of code.  Our GOSUBS and GOTOS included page references commented out so we could find shit.

What was your first language?  BASIC. Not sure of the particular flavor anymore, whatever was on the Apple IIe I suppose.

What was the first real program you wrote? I don't even remember the specifics, but I guess it was a program in Turbo Pascal that did graphing functions. I also wrote a Blackjack game in BASIC around the same time, so I can't claim which was first.  These were the first on an actual computer, in 10th grade I took a Pascal class (that I failed) and also finally had pretty much open access to the home computer that my stepmother never trusted me to use prior to this time.  It was a Tandy 1000 or something like that.  Prior to this I wrote several programs on paper.

Incidentally, I gave up programming altogether shortly after that class and didn't come back to it until well after high school.

What languages have you used since you started programming?  If you want to get super trivial about it, BASIC (in several flavors), VB 4, 5, 6, C#, C++, C, Java, Ruby, F#, JavaScript, VBScript, VBA, JScript, Perl, Scheme, the usual suspects in markup and data querying, Pascal, Lua, does DOS Batch language count? I've written some serious enterprise batch files in my time. Probably a few more scripting one-off languages. Even a little assembler.  The only ones I've used significantly are C#, VB, Java, JavaScript, VBScript, Lua, and the markup/data languages.

What was your first professional programming gig?  Well I started my actual paying career in IT as a help desk guy, eventually becoming the network admin and jack of all trades at a large law firm. So the first code I ever got paid to write was VBA macros in Word. At the same job I also hacked together some Perl scripts on the Unix billing system, wrote some VB utilities to manage the helpdesk, and even did some ASP work. I was hooked on getting paid to code after this job.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?  I think it's at least in part what I was meant to be doing, so yes. I didn't set out to become a programmer. It was a hobby I picked up in middle school that I dropped in high school and only came into as a career accidentally.  It was meant to be.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?  You are never done learning. And be passionate. If you can't be passionate about this work, it's a tough road to hoe.

What's the most fun  you've ever had...programming? There have been times when I've worked late into the night with other team members on these hell-bound deathmarch projects, and you find a way to make the best of it, and you pull together to write some code over too much Red Bull and cold pizza, and yeah that's not the way to be all the time, but when you can be with a group of peers that are in the same boat and can make the best of it with good music or good jokes or just good support, its good times nonetheless.