[phatskat]

Was back on Windows 3.1/DOS, it was mostly trial and error. Trying different commands because my Doom executable stopped working, then learning DIR etc. learning about /? or /help. Eventually understanding more and more bits - definitely kludging my way through it, occasionally finding books at the library on programming that were largely useless but you’d see some commands here and there that you could glean information from.

Eventually got Linux and that opened up a lot for me for learning. I spent a ton of time on the command line as it felt easier to navigate and do what I wanted to achieve. Eventually that led to building kernels, debugging failed builds, etc.

I don’t remember where, but somehow I got a copy of SoftIce and figured out breakpoints and hex editing enough to “crack” my copy of LJpegViewer (I had a key on a floppy somewhere, but I lost it).

All of these little excursions led to me slowly learning more. My first IDE was notepad.exe. My next was briefly one of the slightly fancier editors with HTML highlighting. Then I found pico, and eventually vim, and that’s been my daily for about 13 years now.

A lot of my childhood was doing things I didn’t understand on my computer, often breaking things, and learning to fix them. Poking at the registry with reckless abandon or telnetting cross country because modem’s manual had a list of BBS’s, and grabbing scrap computers from my middle school’s dumpsters.

A fascination with tinkering and being able to be ok if I had to wipe my hard drive.