I'm an "accidental programmer" too (and am not employed in that field at all, although I sneak in Perl into my job now and then, for it always comes in handy).

Back in the day I maintained a personal website (pre-blog era, but similiar ;-) and noticed some scripts were cool, but could be cooler. So I just messed with the existing code and just started altering it. Starting with just altering scalars, to adding features much later.

Years later I finally found this community and got an even worse case of Perl-fever ;-)