I'm a little late to the conversation, but I need to say this just for myself. But yeah I totally get this. As a rising fifth grader in the mid-80's, "somehow" I heard of or got invited to some summer school computer class. Basically for 4 weeks I went back to school and learned about computers on an Apple IIe. We played some lemonadestand game and even wrote BASIC on some Trash80's. That was my watershed moment. Ever since then I knew I was going to be a programmer. I remember as a senior in high school, the only computer class they had was on BASIC programming. Since I had literally been doing it for 7 years, I aced it. The teacher would hand out exams (yes on paper) and I would be done before she finished handing them out to the rest of the class. I hated that I was out in the sticks in highschool though. If only I had someone I could have been mentored from, there's no telling where I'd be now. But hey, I still enjoy programming (debugging MY code, creating code, etc). I'm attending way too many meetings now and I rarely open my IDE at work. But the thrill of creation and making the computer do what I tell it to do is pretty awesome after 30+ years. I need a side project...