I feel like a noob too, mostly because I started at 18!
That's to say, I started taking programming seriously at 18. I did write a crappy Visual Basic exe when I was 8, and I dabbled a bit in Flash ActionScript in my teenage years, but I don't really count those years, because I was learning by rote then.
I really only started taking programming seriously when I was in college. Writing an RTOS from scratch was one of my biggest coding achievements. A lot of times, I wish I have a job that's more technically challenging than what I'm doing now.
I started at age 7 with BASIC on a C64. Then moved on to reading C and C++ books once I could read English. Yeah, I had to learn English before learning how to program. It makes me crack up every time I think about it. Anyhow, I had a, uh, rather interesting phase were I was into reverse-engineering programs and systems. Luckily, I did not have internet access until the end of that phase. Still remember having some fun learning stuff on IRC. By the time I was 20-ish, I was heavily into robotics. But back then the Arduino was not a reality, so it was mostly using PIC16F84 chips and 555 timers. And then I had another BASIC phase, which led me to discover Python. Then Lisp. Then Visual Basic, C#, and the .NET framework. Had too much fun with Python and Lisp. Love them both. Went back to them. I mostly do Python these days, but love writing Lisp whenever I can.
That's to say, I started taking programming seriously at 18. I did write a crappy Visual Basic exe when I was 8, and I dabbled a bit in Flash ActionScript in my teenage years, but I don't really count those years, because I was learning by rote then.
I really only started taking programming seriously when I was in college. Writing an RTOS from scratch was one of my biggest coding achievements. A lot of times, I wish I have a job that's more technically challenging than what I'm doing now.