Stumbled upon Drupal during the Drupal 5 beta days, was impressed (Drupal's code quality made WordPress' and Joomla's pale!). So I built the site for an open source project I started using Drupal (so others could continue it while I studied), and got hooked!
Freelanced while studying by getting paid to add features to Drupal modules I built, did my bachelor & master thesis in web performance optimization for Drupal , which got me an internship at Facebook, which in turn led to my job at Acquia, where I've been working full time on improving Drupal for the past … gasp … 11, almost 12 years 😅
@wim-leers
Wim Leers