I'm an ex-programmer living in Delta, BC, Canada. I moved to British Columbia from Winnipeg, Manitoba back in 1978. The very first time I ever saw a computer was as a kid walking through the Museum of Man & Nature in Winnipeg, probably around 1977 or 1978. I happened across this pedestal that had a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1, Level 1 sitting upon it. It was running a simple BASIC program that let you try to guess the number (one to ten) that it was "thinking" of. At the time, I had no idea what the heck I was looking at because I was only nine or ten years old, a time when nobody even used the word "computer" in casual conversation (even several years later, it was still very surprising to overhear someone in a restaurant talking about any subject involving computers.)
Anyway, around 1979 I was in school, selecting the courses I wanted to take in the coming year. One of the courses was called "Computer Science". I had no idea what that meant, exactly, so I asked the guy behind me. He replied, "I think that's where you learn how to build a computer." I thought that would be pretty cool, so I signed up for it. As it turned out, the course involved learning how to program a computer that someone else (Digital Research) had already built (a PDP-8).
Eventually, my parents bought a computer for the family (an Atari 800 with 16K and a cassette recorder) and I was the only one that really took to the thing. The rest is my history. Over the past 35+ years I've written projects in C, C++, C#, JavaScript and Perl as well as 6502, 65816, 68000 and R3000 assembly languages.
I retired from the industry in 2016. I don't really do a lot of programming any more; I'm more interested in finance and investing these days.