I started writing computer codes on paper long before I had access to a real computer; my first serious programming lesson was a photocopy of a piece by Bill Gates teaching the basics of programming and Object-oriented programming, which I read and re-read like a thousand times; my first hacks were using 'debug', a DOS command-line program, to enter and run assembly language codes on a black and white 386 system just for fun.
My graduate project was creating and documenting a pretty Chess playing application using Borland C++ IDE.
I have been responsible for creating home-grown web/intranet applications and content management systems using raw PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, ...