I got my first computer when I was 15 (in 2001), and after 8-9 months of just playing video games I ended up playing with HTML in Dreamweaver. Over the next year that'd expanded to include CSS, JS, and PHP.
Between the age of 16 and 22 I primarily worked as an IT technician while programming on ever more ambitious projects on my free time. The most ambitious of then was Zynapse, a VERY Rails-like PHP5 framwork I started in 2006. It had i18n and other things from the start, which Rails didn't gain till years later. I never finished though, so uploaded it to Github as-is 4-5 years ago: https://github.com/jimeh/zynapse
When I was 22 and moving to a new city I decided it was time to get paid for programming. Specially since where I was moving to actually had big companies employing programmers, compared to where I used to live there was no local businesses at all hiring programmers. Hence I probably could have started professionally programming earlier if I had easier access to programming jobs.
The first programming job I got was for a Rails shop, so I spent around 10 days familiarizing myself with both Ruby and Rails before they let me work on any real-world projects.
It's now 5 years later, and I live in a much bigger city (London) in another country, and I'm still programming for a living.
As for how I learned to program, it's all been self-taught based on what the internet has to offer in terms of source code, documentation, blog posts, books, and generally just playing around with things to see how it works, and what's the best way to do something.
I should also note that to this day, I haven't actually finished any of the programming books I've started to read. I always end up skimming through them instead to pick a few really interesting things, and then go back to my general goofing-around-for-fun kinda learning style or whatever it might be called.
But as far as I'm concerned you definitely don't need a CS degree or anything fancy to program for a living. I'm sure it helps a lot if you do, but it's definitely not required. You just need to be curious, interested and have some spare time to learn.
P.S. Sorry for not adhering to the 1, 2, 3 structure of your question, I might have gotten a bit carried away :P
No worries for not adhering to the structure, it was just there because I wanted to urge more than "Yes"/"No" replies, I enjoyed reading your post. Very cool story.
I'm self taught at the moment, about to go to a dev bootcamp to really solidify my understanding of web-centric ideas (most of my stuff has been data crunching). Glad to see that so many people are happy in the field without a CS degree.
Between the age of 16 and 22 I primarily worked as an IT technician while programming on ever more ambitious projects on my free time. The most ambitious of then was Zynapse, a VERY Rails-like PHP5 framwork I started in 2006. It had i18n and other things from the start, which Rails didn't gain till years later. I never finished though, so uploaded it to Github as-is 4-5 years ago: https://github.com/jimeh/zynapse
When I was 22 and moving to a new city I decided it was time to get paid for programming. Specially since where I was moving to actually had big companies employing programmers, compared to where I used to live there was no local businesses at all hiring programmers. Hence I probably could have started professionally programming earlier if I had easier access to programming jobs.
The first programming job I got was for a Rails shop, so I spent around 10 days familiarizing myself with both Ruby and Rails before they let me work on any real-world projects.
It's now 5 years later, and I live in a much bigger city (London) in another country, and I'm still programming for a living.
As for how I learned to program, it's all been self-taught based on what the internet has to offer in terms of source code, documentation, blog posts, books, and generally just playing around with things to see how it works, and what's the best way to do something.
I should also note that to this day, I haven't actually finished any of the programming books I've started to read. I always end up skimming through them instead to pick a few really interesting things, and then go back to my general goofing-around-for-fun kinda learning style or whatever it might be called.
But as far as I'm concerned you definitely don't need a CS degree or anything fancy to program for a living. I'm sure it helps a lot if you do, but it's definitely not required. You just need to be curious, interested and have some spare time to learn.
P.S. Sorry for not adhering to the 1, 2, 3 structure of your question, I might have gotten a bit carried away :P