I discovered web development in my junior year of high school in a class that taught HTML, Photoshop, FileMaker and a few other areas I don't remember. I took what I learned and applied it by making several sites at geocities.com that I worked on regularly. I fell in love with how easy it was to make a website. I had no interest in pursuing anything else.
In Fall 2001 I started at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland for an associate degree in Web Programming. The first two years there, I was learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, C++, Java, and Unix.
In the fall semester of 2003, I was doing poorly in a class. At the time, I was working at Gamestop as an Assistant Manager. It was difficult attending college full-time and also working in retail full-time, so I quit my job the first week of January to focus on my studies. My father was quite angry since I was supporting my mother and sister financially. My parents were divorced. It was a rough moment, but I knew it was necessary.
I had scheduled a required class called CA278 Web Database Applications for the Spring 2004 semester (I still remember the class code after all these years). I didn't know what I was getting into. That class taught me a language called ColdFusion. I took to it instantly because it was an easy-to-understand programming language for someone starting off since it was tag-based. You couldn't stop me. I loved it.
The best part: within four months of starting the course (it hadn't finished!) I was hired as an intern at the World Resources Institute in April 2004. This was a breakthrough for me as I was earning a higher hourly wage than I had in retail. My father was very proud. I was more relieved than anything. I had to pay the bills. The decision to focus on school and have that free time to learn the language really paid off.
From there, ColdFusion took me to a few different jobs. In 2007, I moved to New York City to find better work. Since then, I've moved away from ColdFusion professionally, but I continue to work with it in my spare time to see what's new. ColdFusion is a great language with a friendly community that I'm proud to be a part of. I can't wait for its 10th release!
This post was inspired by Steve Bryant's suggestion to make August 1, 2011 the "How I Got Started in ColdFusion" day.