This is tough because I started as a designer who just wanted to make sure my designs worked like I wanted - hacking together what I could find. I slowly developed an understanding of Javascript pre-jQuery, so I was learning the DOM because I had to. Then, I got into Flash development which, at the time, was AS2. If you design and develop, AS3 was/is joy. Not because it was Flash, but because AS3 is close to JS (AS3 is actually a ECMA dialect). Since, I've become pretty good with JS, Ruby, PHP, C#. It's hard to really nail down an exact year since I wouldn't know if it would be appropriate to call what I did years ago "programming".