I was working as an IT guy at a TV station in Utah back in 2012. I was approached one day by the senior graphics designer at the station, who figured I had too much free time on my hands.
He offered me a challenge:
Build something to parse the weather data we receive in .csv format everyday, and then display the correct weather background loop for the weather guy.
I took him up on it. I learned enough Java (to be fair, I had taken an intro to CS class a year or two prior) to cobble together a GUI based program that would send commands via TCP to the VizRT servers (commercial graphics system for broadcasters) and that would control which background clip (sunny, rainy, snowy, etc.) would play. I would read in the .csv file and then extract out the info I needed to determine which clip to play.
I expanded the program to monitor the VizRT servers. It would ping them and if no reply was received I would display the server IP, and highlight it in red to signify an error.
This little side project is what really set me off on the course to learning programming for real. I started looking into alternative education and learned about Dev Bootcamp, a coding school in San Francisco.
Long story short I started learning to program ruby on my own, I applied to Dev Bootcamp, got in, graduated this past March, and I'm now currently on the job hunt. This entire process took just over a year. I've now won hackathons in languages I wasn't even taught (objective-c) and I attend a bunch of local meetups and learn more about programming every day.
I kept a blog for most of this journey, which can be viewed at http://www.rickarubio.com if you'd like to read more about how I transitioned into programming.
You can also check out my code on github: https://github.com/rickarubio
Or follow me on Twitter: @rickarubio
If you're considering learning to code and being a programmer, now is a great time to start :)
Feel free to msg me anytime if you'd like help on learning to code in Ruby or JavaScript!