How it all started
My first touch points I had with programming was in 2001 when I was only 8 years old. I discovered back then a chatting website called Knuddels.de, my first website on the internet that got me hooked. Once you were an active member at Knuddels, you User account was upgraded to a "Family" status. As a "Family" member, you were allowed to have your own "User-Page", which you could either create in a WSGI Editor or in raw HTML. Only few Users were tech savy enough at that time to create fancy dynamic pages. I remember spending full days on learning the basics of HTML, memorizing cool tags that allowed you to animate your text from left to right, right to left, tables, etc. These were quite fun days, I envied the ones who were good in CSS (and I still do) as they made unique looking websites that would even today make it to be an eye catcher. It was not held in secret when a user created a superb looking website. Once someone published a wonderful website, people immediately jumped on it and started to study the source code in the browser and try to understand how it was built. Once upon a time, however, there was this 1337 person poppiing out of nowhere, he had not only a beautiful looking website but was superior to all other websites because it offered functionalities that a normal user would not have on his websites. Fancy animations, a Guestbook,a Music Player, Greeting Dialogs where you would enter your name, the list goes on. These were some examples of what those websites offered and not a lot understood back then that behind this dark sorcery layed on technology: JavaScript.