Kudos to you— having started coding QBasic in fifth grade, I definitely needed 3-4 years of undergrad to be ready for my first professional SWE job.

That's really funny. We first did Logo and then BASIC at that age (~10 years). Good times, eh? Back in the day? Everything was new and fresh.

I was _thrilled_ that I could program with something already on my PC. This was before the internet, and I was under the impression a C compiler was several hundred dollars that we couldn’t afford. Eventually, I even wrote “production” QBasic: my boss at the ISP would manually move spam to a spam folder in Thunderbird, export it periodically and kick it over to tech support. We used to manually look at IPs and enter them into the Cisco blocklist, until I wrote a super janky QBasic script to extracts IPs.

Two years later, I learned about regular expressions.

Haha incredible. What a story. Love that you managed to use BASIC in production. What a tale.

We had to go to computer lab at school to use the computer. But then my parents spent a fortune on getting us one. Now that I think about it, it was like half a year's rent. Jesus Christ, what were they thinking?!

Mostly played games. But then got a Linux CD from a magazine when I was 13. Wiped the drive accidentally trying to partition it. Disaster. Path to writing code begun.