There are some people my age who grew up spending hours and hours playing with computers and programming. I am not one of those people. I do remember playing games and typing huge programs into the Commodore 64 (inevitably with lots of typos so they never worked), but I never quite realized that a computer offered the freedom to be creative. But for the past 10 years or so, I've discovered a passion for computers and have been making up for lost time. Mostly I program because it's interesting and fun. I'm always teaching myself new things, reading books, reading the Web, trying stuff out.
My preferred programming language is Perl, although I also do a lot of programming in C++ and am taking it upon myself recently to learn Ruby as well. Under Windows and Linux, I write all my code (and documentation, and email, and web pages, and everything else) with the best editor on the planet, Vim. It's free, it's powerful, and once you climb the learning curve, it's extremely fast.
Most of my hacking time recently has been devoted to Zyzzyva, a program I have written to help me study Scrabble words. Occasionally (okay, rarely), I also find time to hack on Subversion, an excellent version control system.
