[heleph]

I cut my teeth writing websites using PHP and MySQL, mostly around a computer game I used to play. I got a few thousand hits in the first year and plenty of nice email so I kept going with it and eventually studied software development at uni and have spent the last 15 years working as a developer.

I actually knew a heap of kids around my age (I started at around 15) who I met through my website who did the same thing and many of them also became developers or designers too.

I don't know if the web is still as accessible as it was back then when you could get free hosting somewhere like Geocities if you were just starting out, but I think HTML and javascript are a really nice starting point because it's fairly easy to cobble together something that works and you can get a fairly long way just by trying to make whatever you built just that little bit better. The web is also a good place to learn about the web, particularly since in those days it was easy to view source on anything I saw that I didn't know how to do myself.