Right in the middle of that range (1990). I started learning about computers when I was around 8 years old. My mum bought an old 486 second-hand, and I spent most of my free time using it. We didn’t have a lot of money, and the computer was a great way to entertain myself without needing to spend anything. I had a bunch of shareware/freeware games, but something that really interested me was the Visual Basic system built in to Microsoft Office. In Excel, I’d record macros then look at the code to see how they worked.

Eventually, I did some web development work when I was at school. I built quizzes for some teachers - back when Internet Explorer was used by practically every one, and code was often in VBScript rather than JavaScript. I learnt web development by looking at the source code of the sites I used - that’s not really possible these days due to how large and minified/obfuscated CSS and JS files are now.

I’ve got a copy of one of my sites from 2003: http://www.dansoftaustralia.net/oldest/. Unfortunately a lot of the images are broken. I need to find a copy of them… Maybe in the internet archive.

I went to university from 2008-2011, with a one year work placement (like an internship) in the third year. After I graduated, I started working again at the same company. In 2013, a recruiter from a tech company in Silicon Valley reached out to me over LinkedIn and asked if I’d be interested in applying. I didn’t think I’d get through the interview process, but I did, and moved to the USA. 11 years later, I’m still working at the same company.

I’m sure there’s things you’ve done that I haven’t done. You should focus on things you’ve accomplished rather than things you envy about other people :)