In the late 80’s I was already programming but had done nothing commercial, all my own stuff for just me to use. I was doing work experience at the time and it was coming to an end, my boss said ‘I cannot pay you anything as per the terms of the agreement with the work experience, but that does not stop me funding a bunch of training courses for you. Here is a list of the courses we send our permanent staff on, pick a few and the company will pay’

I picked things like spreadsheets, word processing etc, things I thought would be useful going forwards, I was in my late teens. Gave the list back to my boss, he said great list, I want to add one to the list that I think would be good for you’

He added Dbase 3+ course, this was a 3 day course, day 1 I came out of the course knowing I had found the thing I could get good at, and importantly had value to other people.

Roll forward to today, I am still a developer, my core skill is databases, I have over 30 years experience in Microsoft SQL server and I have enough work for the next few years as a freelancer with the promise of more work down the line.

My son is learning to program at the moment, I am exposing him to as many different things as possible in the hope a little lightbulb goes off in his head like it did with me.

Try lots of things, without trying you won’t know if that lightbulb will go off or not, programming is a hard job, so it has to be interesting to keep up, do what you enjoy then its much less of a job.