I was working at a hotel job part time while doing a bachelor's business degree when I finished the exam prep up to a point where I didn't see a benefit and tried out codecademy.

I had an incredibly pure joy of just creating shitty webpages and doing assignments, learned some javascript and then it hit me.

I started a compsci degree, stopped working and got some student loans and overkilled every programming assignment. I basically thought "If programming is the most valuable part, I'm just gonna max it at the cost of everything else" and it was a fantastic choice.

I applied to all the jobs in Iceland, nobody took me in so I started applying to bunch of jobs in all of Europe. Ended up landing my first job in Germany and that's where it my career started.