@dmoren Congrats! Amazing it’s still online, albeit in the Wayback Machine! (That thing is magic.)
I think I have my first paid piece in the loft (a funny back page for web design mag Cre@te Online on Flash). I was mostly paper-only for my early years.
Oddly, writing was my second career too. I got made redundant during the dot com crash, kind of fell into tech writing and never clambered back out. (Which is perhaps why, over 20 years later, I still have a massive case of imposter syndrome…)