programming
my first intro to programming was dicking around with 
in gr.8 computer club, making shitty games and animations and stuff.
i did some other coding stuff between then and gr.11ish, but what really sealed the deal for me at the time was seeing my friend come back from a hackathon with a load of free company swag 
(like tshirts, stickers, card holders, pens, socks, and more). as a kid with no disposable income, anything free seemed super cool at the time. plus decorating my laptop with a bunch of shiny stickers was always a bonus.
beyond this encounter, i did a shit ton of competitive programming, think codeforces but on a local online judge called dmoj. this hobby of mine consumed my life for about two years straight, solving a new question and farming points, 
watching my rating go up in live-time, and competiting in timed competitions to increase my colored rank, it scratched my brain in the right way to keep me hooked.
in fact almost all of my programming experience in highschool was competitive in nature, whether it was competitive programming, hackathons, or cybersecurity competitions. one of my fondest memories of highschool is of picoctf (a cybersecurity competition). whether it was finding a quiet stairwell to extract an image encoded with sound or running straight to the local mcds after school and sinking hours into the contest, we did it all in hopes of cracking yet another problem and climbing the leaderboard.
as for now, i've been studying at uwaterloo majoring in computer science (and accidently minoring in combinatorics and optimization), learning some cool and some useless stuff + building random stuff.
