I love reading about the startup community and all of the interesting hacks and aspiring to one day do something similar. However I feel like a lot of the stuff I read about is about hackers who have been programming since high school or younger who wizz through college/university and accomplish so much by the time they are 21. Anyone know of some stories about people who did some novel hack/launched some cool startup/did something-hacker-news-worthy who didn't take up programming until post-secondary or didn't launch anything 'cool' until later in life? Someone who coasted or just ran the rat race until they broke out and started doing novel things?
I don't think DHH is the kind of guy who "coasted or just ran the rat race", but he's said before that he never really got into programming until he was in his twenties. He famously went on to create Rails, and become a partner at 37signals.<p>I think what you're asking the community for here is permission to be awesome. Sure, Gates and Zuckerberg are the kind of guys that were super-smart and super-successful early in life, and they're often talked about as models for success. However that doesn't mean that if you haven't changed the world by the time you're 21, you're somehow destined to die bitter and alone on a scrapheap of broken dreams.
Well, I fit into your category of non-typical hackers. I've been around computers for ages, but never really bothered to learn programming beyond some rudimentary HTML. Nor am I a math-oriented person. At the moment, I'm learning HTML, CSS and Rails.<p>Unfortunately I haven't actually <i>done</i> something yet, but I'm working on a project that (I think) will be very disruptive. So, I'll have to get back to you on that one. ;)