In IT school back in 2008 (with 14). I had absolutely no idea about the school or programming, I was just knowing my way around computers, so I signed up for it. We started with C and I remember the first couple of weeks and exercises just doing stuff with printf. Then reading user input with scanf. It clicked pretty early for me, and I loved it.
From there on I was always learning faster and more at home as a hobby, I was mostly ahead in school. A friend and classmate and I coded so many different projects during that time (2D terminal game, PHP forum, PHP CMS that was actually productive for a few years, thereby also learning how the internet worked).
It's just crazy how lucky I got to be interested in this thing at the right time. "Back then" I feel you got so much more time to learn something well, mostly because things weren't changing at crazy speed.
From there on I was always learning faster and more at home as a hobby, I was mostly ahead in school. A friend and classmate and I coded so many different projects during that time (2D terminal game, PHP forum, PHP CMS that was actually productive for a few years, thereby also learning how the internet worked).
It's just crazy how lucky I got to be interested in this thing at the right time. "Back then" I feel you got so much more time to learn something well, mostly because things weren't changing at crazy speed.