My first programming projects were scripts and modules for eggdrop. Every now and then I get a nostalgia flash. :) Surprisingly, some of those are still being used... 20 years after the last release.
Mine were mIRC scripts for banning spammers. Eventually we had a community of people writing bots in perl, PHP, and loads of other languages. I was introduced to Unix by means of wanting to run irssi in screen so I could collect messages even when I was offkyine. It is no exaggeration to say IRC is completely responsible for my career, far more so than education!