I had little programming experience before starting to study computer science. I started working as a part-time programmer during college and have been working in developer rolls since graduating. So at this point I have been getting paid for programming at least part-time for ~14 years, although only a few of those years that was my main job activity.

I used to really like Scala, but I haven’t used it in years. I mostly use C++ these days, but don’t particularly like it. Rust sounds very attractive, but I haven't gotten around to playing around with it much. There is a best tool for any task, but often the best tool is what people already know, so I find the "everything must be rewritten in Rust" stance a bit exasperating.