My Mom taught me HTML (and the rest was history)
I've been working as a professional programmer for a number of years, but I'm almost purely self-taught. Computers have been a lifelong interest of mine which has driven most of my learning. But looking back, I realized that my Mom played a big role in helping me take the first few steps on this path.
In the early 2000s, I was in elementary school and Mom was working as a university lecturer. I can remember finding her doctoral thesis on the family bookshelf; it was so cool to see a book with her name on it, even though I didn't really understand what a PhD was.
As an instructor, she had a basic website for course information that she made herself in HTML. One day she showed me how it all worked - there were tags for text formatting, tables, page titles, and links to other pages. When you open an HTML document in a text editor, you get to see all the markup. But when you open it in a browser, it all gets rendered nicely1. This idea - that the same file has multiple representations - sounds big and abstract, but it was easy to understand when my Mom showed me.
This idea was reinforced when I saw my parents debugging messed up text formatting in Corel WordPerfect. It wasn't HTML, but that word processor had a feature called Reveal Codes to show the underlying markup.
Anyway, I remember playing around with HTML and making pages of my own, the same way that kids might draw in a sketchbook2. But I also experimented more with that idea. Depending on the file extension, the same file will get opened in a different program. So you could flip between .html and .txt to see the file in the browser or in the text editor, but I was curious about how executable programs like games worked. So I changed .exe to .txt... and was stumped by the binary gibberish I saw.
But in grade 6, I got the opportunity to go a little bit further. There was this big school project called the independent study project, where every student got about a month to study any topic they were interested in, to eventually present to the class. And it truly was any topic as long as it passed a basic sanity check with the teacher. There weren't even vague curricular topic requirements3! So naturally, I wanted to learn more about computers and programming.
Mom didn't have much first-hand knowledge here, but she helped me shop for a book which would help me with my project. It was called Beginning Programming for Dummies, and it taught me how to program with a language called Liberty BASIC4.
I soaked up the book like a sponge, at least the parts that I could grasp at 12 years old5. For my class presentation, I made extremely shabby clones of notepad and a calculator. I was so proud of myself.
This taught me another big idea. My teachers, including my Mom, don't know everything. But if there's something that I really want to learn, I can read, experiment, and create my own opportunities. And that's incredibly empowering!
There was still a staggering amount left to learn, but at that point, I had the mental framing6 I needed to keep growing this hobby, this passion, this career. As well as many other things beyond computers.
Thanks Mom.
As nicely as any website can be rendered with approximately no CSS.↩
Except the sketchbook is Mom's work computer, that she uses for work.↩
"You can pick any topic, as long as it has to do with outer space" is just not the same thing at all.↩
These days a $50 programming language aimed at beginners is ngmi but when Microsoft stopped bundling QBASIC it left some gap for this kind of thing.↩
If statements, for loops and goto were no problem. Functions (more specifically, why anyone would need functions when goto exists) and the Win32 API/DLL calls would remain out of grasp for a few more years.↩
They call it a PhD because if you have one you can heal philosophical ailments.↩