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The friendly smile is key.

I was working on a project at an airport - I had something like a six hour layover and set up at a nice table near the food court - I noticed I was being watched and smiled back. The kid came over to me and asked what I was doing. Seems he'd learned some HTML and JavaScript, but was being told in school that "real" programming was super-hard and not for him. We ended up spending about an hour talking about studying CS, how he could learn programming on his own and I eventually sent him away to catch his flight with my copy of the Rat-cover Python book.

He stayed in touch. Today, he's living his dream working on a rather awesome-sounding project.



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