I am an ex-ex-lawyer. I practiced, then quit for five years. In that time, I worked at a dot-com, then did integration for the consulting branch of a software company. Early in that time, I got my M.S. in Computer Science from NYU.
In October 2003, I passed the patent bar. I now practice patent law for a law firm in New York City.
I actually learned to code a long time ago, writing FORTRAN programs on punched cards and running them on a Univac mainframe. I did chores around a university's student computing facility in exchange for computer time. This was back when the timesharing users couldn't play Zork on the mainframe during peak hours because it would have been too heavy a load on the system.