I mentioned a bit of it here. I've been a programmer for so long I don't really exactly recall when I started!
But, to continue that narrative, my senior year of high school was probably when my career technically started. I got a job building a simple ASP website for a small manufacturing education company. This job put me through college, along with another web dev job for a small human resources consultancy. Eventually both projects moved from classic ASP to Rails.
After graduating with a degree in CSci from the University of Minnesota, I did a startup thing for a while. Built a really cool app to make it easy for HR departments to survey compensation and benefits practices from their peer companies while complying with federal antitrust guidelines. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot, but it was failing and Microsoft made me an offer to come work for them on the Test team for Chakra and, well, here I am almost 8 years later :)