This seems like an interesting platform. Digging the old school computer interface. From font choice to colors. Feel like I'm staring into my dad's old Mac circa 1984; or, the follow-on IBM we got later.
Self-taught: I built my first site in 1998. I never wanted to be a developer so much as a user experience person, hence the human-down not metal-up mindset. Unfortunately, the concept of UX hadn't really grabbed on and I didn't have the language or know where to look to find out. I also didn't have the means to pay someone else to make my visions (or experiments) a reality; so, I learned development.
Someone critiqued my HTML as being not that good back in the day; so, I threw myself ever further into the land of development while still keeping up with the psychology of humans and how we interact with the Hulked-up-calculators. I remember the first time I had a portfolio and applying for a UX position at a small shop, the owner said, "You seem more like a developer."
So, I freelanced for a couple years. What I found was that if I could get in doing the thing everyone thinks is hard and they can't do, then I could move on to doing things I was a bit more interested in. Therefore, software development became a way for me to get my foot in the door and see about doing other things.
After almost 20 years, I've started looking at the coding problem as a UX problem. The user in this case being the next developer in line. Of course, that's made some of my opinions around certain things a little more strict but it also eases my feelings about being labeled "a developer". :)
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