Software as a hobby
I had always been interested in computers and writing software, but never had the money to buy my own home computer until I was working as an engineer. So around 1991 I bought my first PC, an IBM PC Clone made by a company called Micron which was running Microsoft Windows 3.0 (which was really just a program running on top of the DOS operating system). I also bought a book on the C programming language and a Turbo C compiler program by a company called Borland and taught myself how to program in C. (I had taken a BASIC language programming class in high school and had one programming class during my ASU Electrical Engineering degree (in Fortran), but C was the up and coming language at that time).
Once I read the programming book and tried all their little projects, I made up projects of my own to push myself to learn more about programming and about how PC computer hardware worked. This was all done as a hobby at home while I was working as an engineer, although as I developed programming skills I was able to bring those into the various engineering jobs I had.
Hobby projects I programmed...
(click an assignment for more details)