Oh, this is one of the most exciting stories I've read here. Mainly because I believe we are teaching new programmers in an absolutely wrong way how to be a programmer. It's very sad for me to hear that you may have been one of the people we've discouraged from pursuing the career fully. I believe we need a change asap, otherwise we will keep producing a new generation of absolutely frustrated programmers. I'm happy you were able to pivot to something else that's related, but that's your success and we still have more and more people in similar situation that may not be so lucky...
I've been writing about this topic recently. Should you be interested in finding out what I think went wrong with the education process, here are a few links to check out, both mine and from other writers:
https://medium.com/swlh/design-patterns-smalltalk-and-the-lost-art-of-reading-code-1727d93fd7fa
