My uncle has definitely been my biggest influence. My parents never understood computers and refused to buy one. Eventually my uncle gave me an old Win95 box with an 8GB HDD, and 512 MB of RAM(most other people in the world were running XP at this point). The thing was completely useless as a computer to do work on when I received it.

The internet wasn't really a thing yet back then, but I managed to figure out how to clean up the OS, as well as taking it a part and figuring out the parts.

He was the one who taught me that with computers, all things are possible.

From there he was always buying me books about programming, and pointing me in the right direction. He was never one to give me the answer, but always told me where to look or what to ask.

Now I'm the main web developer at my company and I love what I do.