Personally, I started off with Roblox back in the early 2010s, and taught myself Lua. I really liked those Tycoon games, and wanted to see how they worked.
I eventually found Minecraft (like every kid back in the day did), and learnt Java to make Bukkit server mods.
Around 2016 I thought websites were kinda cool, so I started learning HTML, CSS, and JS, and I’ve been in the web dev space ever since.
What about the rest of y’all? What’s your personal programming path?
I feel like universities have a special opportunity to teach really cool concepts that would be impractical in bootcamps and such; learning about the maths behind algorithms and data structures, how to evaluate them objectively, learning about grammars and expressions, building interpreters / compilers, all this stuff that can be really useful if you find yourself working beyond simple CRUD stuff.
That being said, these days so much work is just CRUD, so ymmv.
I think I just had a bad experience with choosing a local university and believing the lies that it’s top university in my country and is comparable to foreign ones. I have a lot of friends who studied abroad and their programs sounded so much more useful and up to date. I’ve thought about enrolling into a foreign university from time to time but the amount of sour taste my local one left and how comfortable I am already in the job market makes it a very difficult decision.