Discussion on: What has your developer journey looked like?

Youthful attempt to program chatbot to simulate friendship. 
Discovered if I stayed awake long enough computer would talk to me anyway.
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Friend gives me a shell on his Linux desktop.
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Uni (CJ/Sociology), college gives me shell on SPARC Ultra 10 host. I goof-off 
in UNIX lab, hawking my services to CS students who cannot tar-up their final 
exams for submission.
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Fall-into alleged web "Startup", never see a dime.
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Convince social services internship to let me code an intranet database 
application, trade on this for the next 10 years.
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Sell service as "IT consultant": install printer drivers, berate Limewire users, 
babysit samba install on Fedora. Learn to tear-down a wide 
format printer to make mechanical repairs, service blueprinting machines, 
that I don't like Windows 
servers.
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Clients discover Fedora boxes need little maintenance and that leasing 
large format printers is much cheaper than having an on-call geek; they cut 
my hours to about 4 per-month per-client.
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Take helpdesk job, have related nervous breakdown in public.
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End-up at repair desk at CompUSA, learn professional deportment and some humility. 
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Laptop tech for Dell, learn that I hate driving for a living.
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Answer Craigslist ad, get job at NYSE. Cower at NYSE hiring through staffing 
agencies that troll Craigslist, sell stock portfolio for cost of a pizza.
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Trade money for self-respect, join Thomson Financial as apps analyst. Fall in 
love with job. Go on-call for 4 years, sweat blood, help to shepherd integration 
with Reuters. Make lifelong friends, visit India to train new ops shift. Learn 
important lessons in cross-cultural communication, potency of Indian beer.
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Get bored, join established company that manages AI-augmented IT services as 
automation developer. Discover proprietary platforms and hard-partying culture are 
not my thing.
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Go to current employer, learn quite a bit about workplace culture-fit. Sit on 
floor in front of Bell Labs programmers who regale me with stories about the 
adolescence of UNIX, debug goofy LISP problems with a guy with plaque on desk for 
his role in invention of the blue LASER. 

Stop styling myself as old-man-UNIX.

Launch a fleet of Jira hosts, cluster Github Enterprise, do various weird and 
ugly chores no one else who can has time for. 
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