I'm 42 and my gender is female. I've just skewed the results now, haven't I?
I've been a developer in the software industry for over 20 years and started with some form of BASIC (GW-BASIC maybe?) on TRS-80 machines with cassette tapes in high school. For part of my final project in my high school class, I was trying to animate spider legs with an algorithm by refreshing the screen with X's displaying in the proper position on the screen. It didn't work and I pulled it - that was my very first pruning of an overextended project.