Personally, I started off with Roblox back in the early 2010s, and taught myself Lua. I really liked those Tycoon games, and wanted to see how they worked.
I eventually found Minecraft (like every kid back in the day did), and learnt Java to make Bukkit server mods.
Around 2016 I thought websites were kinda cool, so I started learning HTML, CSS, and JS, and I’ve been in the web dev space ever since.
What about the rest of y’all? What’s your personal programming path?
I feel like universities have a special opportunity to teach really cool concepts that would be impractical in bootcamps and such; learning about the maths behind algorithms and data structures, how to evaluate them objectively, learning about grammars and expressions, building interpreters / compilers, all this stuff that can be really useful if you find yourself working beyond simple CRUD stuff.
That being said, these days so much work is just CRUD, so ymmv.