I started my first Drupal site half a year ago only while living in Portugal: www.internationalhumanistparty.org without much previous programming experience. I learned a lot from the book Pro Drupal Development, and used that knowledge to develop a voting system for our organization's internal elections (national and international coordinating teams). I love Drupal and hope to get a job in the future. One of my interests is to develop a module that improves Drupal's multilingual features.
I am active in various open source projects and came to drupal when version 5.0 was released. I'm head of software development at Cocomore AG where currently 14 of our developers are working on drupal projects.