[JonD23]

Video games were my gateway into computers. I contribute my path as a developer to when I started playing the Quake 1 demo in 96. I remember getting the demo from a pc mag cd, and spending all day playing. One day I wanted to start learning to make my own mods. So that started me on my development path.

But I totally agree, I hope I don't let me kids play as much games as I did. I got lucky, but everyone is different.

[larrybolt]

That is exactly the way I tried introducing more useful alternatives to spending time behind a pc to my younger brother and sister. By showing them how they could write mods or even complete games with programs such as Cinema4D, Maya, Photoshop, Unity...

It didn't stick very long, but I hope I had some positive influence on their life in that aspect.

It is a very interesting subject though on how developers got into development! My first programming experiences was with mIRC and its funky scripting language to make simple irc bots.