My first real experience with programming. There was a small group of kids at school that started writing all sorts of programs for the TI-83. Games and cheat programs galore. Still proud of some of the games I wrote.
Perl was the first "real" programming language that I learned. I wrote a bunch of CGI applications for a web site that I worked on... stuff like guestbooks, forums, and rudimentary databases backed by flat files.
Started using Java in college. Then spent several years as a contractor writing software for the US government. I also wrote operant chamber control software for my wife's master's thesis. Pigeons pecked at a touchscreen to receive pellets of food as a reward.
PHP was a godsend back in the day. It really changed how I thought about web development. Learning "lightweight" web programming made me a much better and more sensible Java EE developer.
The summer between my junior and senior years in college, I worked at a VB shop in my hometown. It turned out to be a great experience working on some really cool apps like a program for tracking the sales of explosives and a point-of-sale system for an animal feed manufacturer.
I used this at the Treasury Department to test the web application that my company was developing. We used Ruby to scrape the site to test output and automated IE using Microsoft COM bindings.
