I'm a programmer. I've done work in a couple of very different languages. The biggest skill I took away from that is to teach myself something from nothing. It makes facing something completely foreign a lot less daunting as I know I have good shot at figuring it out with a bit of time and some luck.
I discovered computers and gaming when I was little and it always tickled me to know how they worked. I tinkered my way to literacy on our first windows pc and I took up programming in high school. I dropped out off university due to depression and I figured since programming was the only subject I truly aced I may as well give it a shot. Since then I have worked in C++, labview, C#, various Javascript frameworks, flex and a smattering of python and lua. The most insane thing I have managed was getting a finger print scanner to pick up on Ubuntu, interface with it through a c++ library I wrote called from a python script and passing the result via xmlrpc to a C# application on a Windows box. In a week. I miss those days.