Spent the better part of a decade getting dirty in the LAMP stack pig pen (to clarify: the *nix, Apache and MySQL bits are excellent; the PHP bit, rather muddy)

Lest anyone think I'm a coding Luddite, this is my current stack:
1) Scalatra + Scalate on Jetty 8
2) ScalaQuery (functional JDBC wrapper)
3) Cake DAL to MySQL & Jedis
4) SBT Coffeescript + LESS
5) Apache 2.4 + mod_pagespeed
6) Amazon CloudFront CDN

Now, why would any self respecting programmer spend even a day writing PHP, much less years slopping around in the mud? Well, it's called a Bachelors in English Literature and a Masters in Psychology (read: became a programmer vs. born a programmer)

I actually did start coding quite early on, at age 10. We had a Commodore-64, followed by an Atari; on the Atari, one day a blue screen popped up with some line numbers. Bored, I started playing around. Little did I know, I was "coding" in BASIC. Well, that was short-lived, went back to the Atari video games. Years later in college I took a couple of programming classes out of curiosity, but the subject didn't grab me in the same way that Jung, Freud, Erikson, Rogers et al did.

At any rate, during the last semester of my psychology program, our department's ancient website needed some updates made. I volunteered and...the rest is history.