My fascination with programming begun when I got my first programming task. Our high school math teacher asked us to write an application to check logical equations. I got back home and immediately started working on it. The problem was, I knew very little about programming. Although the application was quite simple it took me the whole night to get it right. Despite all the hours spent on the problem I was too excited to notice that I had no sleep.
I was hooked on programming and problem solving. This lasts to this day, although I wrote that first application some twenty years ago.
Back it wasn't easy to learn anything especially where I grew up. I didn't know any other programmers. There was no Internet to look up an answer and most definitely there was no StackOverflow.
Nowadays it's much easier to find necessary technical information. The hard problem is to design whole systems and how all the bits should fit together.
Even harder and at the same time more important task is to figure out what problem we are trying to solve with a given piece of software.