I didn't learn programming when I was 12

Will be on it, just wanted to post right out the gate of making the blog. I guess you can say I'm training myself to not be embarrassed of looks for the MVP if I ever have a startup.

I am one of those guys who has been programming since he was 12 (I call it 11 actually). I'm now 23.

Before I went to college, I thought my programming skill was high enough to get me a good job. I was just going for that piece of paper, the degree.

Two and a half years later I dropped out. I looked back on my 18-year-old self and realized what a terrible programmer I had been. But now I was ready. Some courses and a bunch of awesome internships had prepared me.

A year or so later, I got a job offer at an NYC startup. Looking back on my pride-filled self at that time, I now realize what a terrible programmer I had been.

I'm still at that startup, and it still kicks my ass from time to time. After 11 years of programming, it's still hard to believe there's a cap on knowledge. There's definitely not a cap on experience

Starting to program at 18 is early. I took 2 programming courses in college (1 was a Pascal-clone, and the other was an assembly language course), but I essentially taught myself how to program after graduating from college, and have made an entire career out of it, and I'm more than double your age. Don't worry about it, you have plenty of time.

Started sometime between 8 and 12, depending on how you define it.

I'm 24 now and work at a startup, I had a similar experience to yours, except I dropped out my first quarter of school.

I've changed a lot since 18, I can say that much.

I honestly believe that if you took someone totally naive to programming and put them through an intensive CS + programming apprenticeship, they'd be a better programmer than me in 1 or 2 years easily.

I'm 38 and I started programming when I was 10, and I still sometimes cringe when looking at code I wrote a year ago. This is the natural state of things as long as you keep improving. You should only panic when this stops happening.

See also: John Carmack's recent QuakeCon speech where he talks about basically the same thing in the context of looking back at the Doom3 era id code compared to the Rage era code.