Years after my parents got a divorse, my father found another woman who was a nerd and had hundreds of video games. She collected the CDs from that one gaming magazine Computer BILD Spiele. ("Spiele" = "games") That's how I became aware of the magazine. It regularly came with many small and often one full game (mostly older ones, though). Hence, I regularly got myself the magazine as I didn't have the money for 40€+ retail games
I became obsessed with those magazines. When relatives asked me what they could get me as presents, I was often lost, not knowing what to wish for
(except for that one time, at bandcamp, when ALL I wanted as a Wii) (which ofc I didn't get)
So I often casually suggested that they could get me a current edition of that magazine. As it is cheap, they usually liked that idea but being older relatives, they easily got confused and gave me the wrong magazine. In particular, I often got the Computer BILD. How annoying! that one has NOTHING to do with games, it's JUST about PCs and programs! eurgh
But having nothing better to do, and due to a lack of money and friends, I often read through those magazines as well. They weren't THAT boring after all… (as you could guess the Computer BILD is a general PC magazine, and the CBS is the game-specific sub-magazine of that) that's how I became interested in PCs
Coincidentally, I found out about a game Vampires Dawn. A cheap-looking RPG game that was free. I learned about it, and it was made with the tool RPG Maker, for which I found a cracked version online. I played around with it, making my own small mini-games. You can also add interaction, clicking buttons to make user-flows like "when talking to this NPC, make it say this, change the inventory like that, bla bla" And I wanted to see to what extreme I could take this, so I started making complex flows, which eventually ended up with a complete weather system, better than anything I found online
I found a forum post about someone trying to make a game, who's looking for someone like me to help him with the logic. But he used a newer version of the RPG Maker, which had a REAL scripting engine! one where you write code with CODE, not by clicking buttons. So I bought a physical book to learn the programming language.
I was so shy, when a librarian approach me as she saw I was lost looking for a book, I said "I am looking for a book about the language 'RUBY' ". I was so afraid of being labelled a geek, I didn't even want to look at her'
she was so confused by that language, that she asked more questions, until I eventually said it's a PROGRAMMING language.
And THAT's how I learned coding.