Comment by jhoelzel

ohh the memories.

This is how it all started out for me, in the end of the 90, at 11 to 14 I made my way from a lousy lurker to a top-site tech admin. Those were the days I tell you.

I started out as a kid in the FXP scene learning PHP to modify our bulleting boards (vbb & woltlab) back in the day with statistical data, to compare crews on a board working against each other.

Well as kids are, with 14 I idled regularly on the #PHP quakenet channel, as the scene was using IRC all day long anyway. As you are with 14, I blasted out, that "PHP can solve all of my problems, why would anyone ever learn something else" upon which a london financial coder basically told me "come here boy, I will show you what real programming actually looks like" and thaught me c# over the course of year, remotely with RDP. Suffice to say I was hooked and having a mentor that really explained to me the advantages of strongly typed programming languages, I fell in love with c# too and shortly after decided to try to run my first startup with it.

Luckily where i live none of that was illegal at the time and legislation only cought up years later, but boy was it brilliant. It felt like the smartest tech people from all branches gathered in IRC to keep themselves entertained, but at the same time shared their wisdom with you. Sure, they would try to troll you too, but thats more an initiation ritual :D