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 nicely. 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 sketchbook. 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 requirements! 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 BASIC.
I soaked up the book like a sponge, at least the parts that I could grasp at 12 years old. 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 framing I needed to keep growing this hobby, this passion, this career. As well as many other things beyond computers.
Thanks Mom.