Recorded daily weather on sheets of paper or in a notebook from when I was a child as despite being brought up in a city I found weather fascinating. I did not have enough knowledge to get into it as a professional career, and my notes relied on instruments sold for gardeners, not to quality needed for professionals.
On retirement, I bought myself a Fine Offset Weather Station, of the earliest design that I still use (although some parts have been replaced).
Started using Cumulus 1.9.2 (build 1017) just because I wanted something that would produce web pages that I could experiment with (as I had decided to learn HTML 5, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP and MySQL; initially because I thought it gave me a saleable skill for my retirement). People described me as "Stupid Fool with Weather Station" (back when I had a public web site, and that made me register as SFWS!
To thank Steve Loft, I agreed to finish off those Wiki pages that had been started by others, and then abandoned. That represented the start of an enormous amount of time devoted to documenting the original Cumulus software.
The newer features of MX are irrelevant to me, so someone else will need to finish off the MX documenting, I have just started some of the structure.