I can't remember a time when I didn't love puzzles.

When people ask what, as a kid, I wanted to be when I grew up, I always say that I wanted to be Sherlock Holmes. I even asked for (and received) a magnifying class for my 8th birthday.

But later that year, at Christmas 1998, we got our first family PC, running Windows 98. Of course, my parents also picked up several kids' games for learning math and reading; and those were fun enough. But mainly, I loved trolling through any program I could find on the PC and figuring out how it worked and what it was capable of.

I remember one occasion, when my younger brothers were outside building a snowman, I came back inside early to figure out why, sometimes, Microsoft Word would insert new characters before existing characters and other times would overwrite the existing characters (that's when I learned about the insert key on a Windows keyboard). Another time, I spent hours mastering every paragraph styling option. (For a while, Word was my main source of puzzles.)

Eventually, existing programs felt less shiny than the idea of writing my own programs, which is when I decided that I wanted to build websites, to be a programmer. And from the beginning, I knew I wanted to write the code, and not use WYSIWYG editors. Someone gave me a copy of Making Websites for Dummies, and I was so disappointed when most of it was about Java Applets, Dreamweaver, and other copy-and-paste embeddables. There was a single page (more like half-a-page with a large illustration) that introduced actual code: that was where I learned my first bit of HTML: <div>, <h1> and <hr>.

But that hooked me.

Finally, I was writing "code" to control this computer. From there, I got books on HTML (XHTML, actually) and JavaScript, and started learning. I found Douglas Crockford's lectures on JavaScript and watched them repeatedly, until I finally started to understand some of it.

I even wrote him a very formal-sounding email, asking for help.

April 22, 2008

Dear Mr. Crockford,

I'm a high school student aspiring to be a developer and I would like to learn JavaScript well. I recently saw your Action-packed JavaScript Trilogy and enjoyed it a lot (although I didn't understand all of it!). I have a basic understanding of JavaScript, have wriiten a few extremely basic scripts, and want to go deeper. Do you have a list of recommended sites, articles, etc. for a beginning scripter?

Thank you for your time and help!

Sincerely,

Andrew Burgess

Unsurprisingly, I never got a response.

At some point, I moved away from the web for a while, and learned some Visual Basic. Bob Tabor had a bunch of high quality free videos on one of Microsoft's developer websites. But it didn't take long for me to return to the web, and that's where I've been in one form or another ever since.