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I didn't do any dev until high school (visual basic class!) and then circa 2006 my (computer illiterate) dad desperately tried to convince me not to go to college for computer science. CNN business news or something convinced him that programming jobs would be gone in the future.
Instead they'd all go overseas and pay bottom-dollar, or something. So I never had any role models in the field (I didn't know a single dev) only anti-role models. I'm glad I didn't listen.
Actually, I did have one role model: Geocities.
Actually, I did have one role model: Geocities.
I always assumed that programming was some inaccessible arcane magic done by Professionals in Suits in Office Buildings, and Geocities gently made me realize it's not true at all, you can just type stuff. And it works! And you never need permission.
The permission-free nature of making things, and the fact that all I needed was a keyboard is what convinced me computer science must be powerful enough to be interesting. No budget and no expertise didn't matter, you could still try and figure things out.
When people talk of role models, I think of this situation, where inexplicably they (people at least) didn't exist, what really mattered was Geocities. Fundamentally education is about expanding a person's idea of what is possible to do and Geocities did that.
There's nothing *quite* like geocities today, which is sad, but what's worse is that we've added all this crazy tooling on top of web dev. There's more resources for self-starters than ever before, but as soon as they peer in they must be facing a ridiculous blob of complexity.
I worry that by being clever with the ecosystem of tooling, we're shutting out a lot of new people. It's harder to peer in and see something easy and fun and full of possibility, like it was with Geocities.
