[bwldrbst]

I was interested in coding from a young age but was a terrible student. I barely scraped through high school and never completed any tertiary education. By 22 I was unhappily working as a pizza store assistant manager.

I then took a pay cut to get a job as a tech support guy at a tiny local internet provider. Over the next couple of years the company merged with a bunch of other small ISPs and I found myself given more responsibility. Not liking all the paperwork this involved I wrote some web based tools in perl to make my life easier. This was noticed, as was the fact that I was cheaper than a "real" programmer, and when they wanted to expand the dev team I was given the job. Now, after more than a dozen years and quite a few different organizations I'm a team lead on a pretty large and successful system.

I guess the point of the story is to build stuff, especially stuff useful to you right now, and don't be afraid to take risks.