I've always been the kid who was into technical stuff. Before I was in elementary school, I would insist that my dad let me help put together my Hot Wheels tracks and such. On a rainy day when I was 8, I had locked myself in my room to avoid my family, and I was lucky to have a computer to myself there. I turned my focus for that day towards it, and I wondered how it worked, so I googled "How to code". The first result that came up at the time (circa 2006) was
https://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/c-tutorial.html, and an hour or two later, I had learned the basics of my first programming language.
I didn't really care that much about computers at the time, though. Over the years, I became a power user of Windows, iOS, and macOS, but I was way more into sports, particularly baseball. After a while, though, I became the fat kid that all the pitchers liked to hit, and when the pitchers started learning to throw 80 MPH fastballs in early high school, I decided I needed a new hobby. That's when I started getting serious about understanding code and becoming a developer.
I bounced around free tutorial after tutorial online, and I ended up with a solid understanding of how to make a static website. I saw a few ads between YouTube videos for a more cohesive online coding school called Treehouse, and they were running a promotion at the time where if you bought one of their pro subscriptions, they'd give one for a year for free to a public high school student. I thought to myself, "Hey, I'm a public high school student. I wonder how I can get on the receiving end of that?", and so after some googling, I found their CEO's email address, and asked him. He got me set up with that, and I've been hooked ever since. I taught myself everything from the web front-end to scripting languages like Python to mobile development. Nowadays I'm a moderator on their community forums, supporting myself as a freelance iOS/web developer.
In high school, I was also really into the technical clubs I had available to me. I went for the majority of my Junior year to a high school in suburban Philadelphia, where I joined the robotics club, which got pretty much all my attention and passion while I was there. There was also a computer science club there, too, which was part of the Hack Club family of high school coding clubs. I loved that club, too. It was a great time to stop worrying about the stresses of they day/week before, and just sit back and work and learn about code with other people who're into it. I enjoyed it so much that when I went back to my former high school in suburban Nashville for my Senior year, I started another Hack Club there, too. Since then, I've pretty well known what my life's passion is, and now I'm trying to use it to start a career.
Treehouse: https://teamtreehouse.com
Hack Club: https://hackclub.com
My website: https://hulet.tech