I am an ex-chemist and current programmer. I started programming during my PhD, but it was only after that I realised how dauntingly different non-academic programming is.
I started by accident, writing web pages as a second income. I then stumbled around learning as much random knowledge as I could, which ended up being a whole lot of WordPress (it paid the rent). In the last few years I’ve been focusing on web applications using jQuery (and where I couldn’t avoid it JavaScript), and mobile apps (currently just iOS but Android will be soon).