My uncles, dad, and grandfather were all different flavours of engineers (electrical, chemical, software) and I was good at science and math in school so I figured I'd be "an engineer" when I grew up. (Yep, very broad.)
In middle and high school I got addicted to fantasy novels and then RPG games including this text-based roleplaying MUD: middle-earth.us/
I started helping run that MUD and had to install Linux and learn to program to make the changes I wanted.
I loved programming and also the fact that this Linux thing was built by volunteers all over the world and totally worked blew my mind and I got really excited about free software and decided that software was my future.
Basically, the trajectory went like this:
This is great