1. Why are you interested in programming? What have you done to expose yourself to programming so far?
When I was very young, my mother worked as a contract computer programmer out of our basement, typing code on a keyboard that was plugged into an old television, and saving her data on a tape recorder. She taught my sister and I some very basic skills, using books that provided buggy code for making not-very-sophisticated things happen on the screen. Neither of us ended up as programmers (yet), although we both work very comfortably with technology in our professional lives in large part due to this early exposure to it.
This childhood introduction to computers has made me more comfortable with them than many people (I am everyone’s go-to first-line tech support person), although my formal programming education is confined to a single introduction to computer science course that I took as an undergraduate student. As the web became more and more important, my work as a graphic designer expanded to inclu