I'm always interested in learning others' stories. How and why did you start learning game development?
Mine:
Like most of us, I grew up playing games. My earliest memories are playing games I can't even remember the names of on Atari, Donkey Kong on Colecovision, and I remember when I received a Nintendo along with Legend of Zelda, SMB, 10 Yard Fight, and Top Gun. My imagination would run wild during my days at school, so I started doodling levels and maps for different games. I'd draw my favorite characters, like Link and Mario (if I had the motivation I'd dig up the Mario coloring book I made when I was a kid and show it), then come home and play more games. I did a lot of other things as a kid, but any "down time" was playing games.
Then I learned that you could do that for a living, and around that time I also got some exposure to computers. Some in my family came across a Commodore Plus 4 at a garage sale, and while they didn't know what I could do with it (if anything), they left it up to me to figure that out. In the manuals was a BASIC programming guide. And that's when I learned how to make games.
"Flip a coin" was the first. Don't discount that simple BASIC code. In fact one should never discount anything based on its scope. The act of making that interactive, RNG, text-based game opened the mind to all kinds of possibilities. More simple games followed - and then I learned how to render lines on the Commodore and my focus turned to graphics.
As I learned more about programming, my ambitions expanded, and I shifted into a pattern of learning more about game development by trying to replicate gameplay from games I loved to play. I jumped interest in BBS games and started writing a clone of BRE and SRE in Turbo Pascal. I did a TradeWars 2002 clone and a few other ideas I'd play with, like multiplayer games over a serial connection between two PCs (had to write the serial driver).
I loved to play Warcraft, and one of my first C/C++ language uses was to make a text-based/ASCII turn-based, two-player Warcraft clone.
Somewhere along the way I came across mode 13h. I spent many nights learning 3D graphics and rendering spinning boxes.
Various other game projects came and went. I loved to read others' source code and learn how they approached many of the same problems I've faced. These days I can easily spend hours on Github.
GameDev.net spawned out of a love for all the above and a desire to make it easier for people to learn and connect with others about game development - and nearly 20 years later (in June 2019!) all the above is still fuel for the fire.
Eventually, I got a job in the simulation training industry - basically serious games interfaced with real equipment for training purposes. I worked on various products for a few years until we made the decision to upgrade our technology. Unity was brand new and barely functional, and UE2 lacked the necessary features, so as Technical Director I architected and led a team to develop an internally used game engine and toolset (entity-component) based on ~40 commercial/open source packages but with many of the same content creation capabilities in modern engines, including things like blueprints. The goal was to build a simulation and training curriculum without having to write a line of code, and we came very close to achieving that in most cases. Production went from ~12 months to ~3-4 months. Big win for the company and a total cultural change.
Now I'm in semiconductors with a team working on developer tools, and we work with a lot of developers around the industry. Depending on what you do, it's possible you use my team's products. My game making days are pretty minimal, but I always have the urge and a list of games I'd like to work on. But making sure everyone here has a game development community through GameDev.net tends to take most of my free time. 
[EDIT: I should clarify why I didn't go into games. It basically came down to a certain type of work-life-pay-location balance that I wanted to have at the time I started my career, so instead of going into the industry I decided to do the next best thing and work where I got to work on the same type of technology, but the end product was different. I've thought about going more directly into games in more recent times, but I'm at a much different stage of my career now (engineering director-type) so it would have to be the right fit.]
Having said that, it's motivating to see what everyone is doing, and I appreciate seeing how the industry has evolved since those early Commodore days.
So, what's your story?
