Im 25. I remember my dad mentioning writing software to compute the trajectory of artillery shells when he was a Navy cadet. He later went on to establish some of the early IT institutes the Navy uses to train it's personel (this was some time in the mid 90s).

I would hang out with my dad in his office, and that's when i first saw computers. Later on, i was exposed to Foxpro programs in high school and two semesters of C in freshman year. But i was too busy fooling around with my buddies to take notice. I was studying EE, so din't really get much programming practice except for some Matlab.

It was only toward my third year in college when i sensed that having good programming skills might be useful. That's when i started doing some project Euler problems. My final year project involved an embedded networked application, and that's when got to know about GCC, linux and the open source world.

I am now a programmer in a research lab, and my masters thesis involves building machine learning models for an underwater acoustic communication system.