It's incredibly timely to be doing this now, because up until this very month, I thought it was a bit of a stretch to call me "successful".
Most of my experience in software is through volunteering for Exercism and even when you contacted me about doing this, I was technically unemployed.
This just changed a couple of weeks ago, when I received my first sponsorship to work on open source!
In preparation for this, I kind of accidentally got addicted to your podcast, and have spent a huge amount of time listening to the back episodes, trying to recognize common themes, and thinking about what qualities are expresses by my favorite guests.
One of my favorite topics that comes up so often is impostor syndrome, and one of the most comforting things is to hear how many, if not most people have it at some point in their career.
Dennis traub spoke about it so well, and used the term "pluralistic ignorance", and just beautifully described how the illusion that we are the only one who doesn't know everything, is indeed an illusion.
But I'd like to actually take it a step further, and claim that there's actually no such thing as a beginner at all! It is precisely our unfamiliarity in a certain domain that is a result of our greater familiarity in another domain, and by understanding this we can not only quench our feelings of inadequacy, but transform them into an advantage. There is a quote from M Gazzaniga, the leader of cognitive neuroscience, that perfectly describes my career path "Take risks at the edge of scholarship and seek integration. Most forays won't yield anything, but some certainly will." - (Split Brain) When switching careers, it is vital to realize that there's... I would go as far as to say that there's actually no such thing as a complete beginner, because everything you've ever done, all of your previous skills, they come with you. So when Gazzaniga says "seek integration", what that means to me is that we should do everything we can, both in thought and action, to treat our "newness" in a particular field as the opposite side of the coin as the tremendous assets that we bring to the table from everything we have previously learned.
It would actually be pretty much impossible to tell my story without addressing various mental health issues, because it was growing up with severe undiagnosed ADHD, and also autism, that caused me to go down the winding path towards finding a career, and the coping strategies that I developed continue to form the foundation of my work habits, and also my entire approach to "work" itself which is, I think, incredibly rare.
See: https://porkostomus.gitlab.io/posts-output/2023-01-07-Work-life-balance/
Rather than trying to start at the beginning and try to figure out what the important bits are, it might be fun to try to... "lazily execute" the telling of the story, starting with the most important part and going back to fill in the details when necessary. At the end of the day we're going to have to go back to the beginning anyway, but there are just so many interesting stories that I want to keep drawing the lines to highlight how each part contributes to where I am today, in a way that will benefit the largest variety of listeners.
So the single most significant, recent beginning was when I actually decided to start studying computer science and be come a programmer, which didn't actually happen until I was already... about 35! So I'll try to start there, and work backwards.
I think one of the most beautiful things about my path is how winding it was, and involved huge swings of the pendulum that caused, well nothing short of personal transformations. I chose the software industry not as an initial thing from the get-go, but as an unexpected twist that I only arrived at because of the synthesis of all my previous fields of study.
My academic life got off to an incredibly rough start, and I now understand that this was likely due to being very neurodivergent, but somehow I developed fairly convincing masking behaviors, or at least, just convincing enough to get people to leave me alone. I ended up spending most of my teenage years making music in my room, and dropped out of school as soon as I was able to.