Hey everyone! I'm here to introduce myself, so I guess I'll share a little bit about me.
By the age of 12, I knew that I had a future in technology. The internet as we know it was a young thing back then (it's been over 20 years), but I knew I loved programming QBASIC in the DOS editor, and anything that wasn't nailed down my by parents got taken apart and put back together again (...mostly). I programmed a bunch of ASCII games and an "arcade" that you could play them all from. I took apart old stereos and used a soldering iron to pull out all of the components and categorize them in medicine bottles so that I could re-use them after picking up electrical diagrams at the local RadioShack.
In short, I was a huge nerd, but the world wasn't a kind place to kids like me. I was ruthlessly mocked and picked upon. I won the Science Fair in middle school and was so badly teased that next year the school agreed to let me voluntarily withdraw from participating to avoid any further conflict. Instead, I flew out to see my cousin on the other coast, where he worked as a design lead for a popular video game franchise, and that's when I decided I wanted to make video games some day as a career!
When I entered college, I was determined to become a video game programmer, but it didn't take long for me to realize that, while I am a good programmer, making games and playing them are two very different things. I ended up dropping out without finishing my degree and opening my own laptop repair business. In doing so, I also learned something else about myself; I'm a competent technician but not a good businessman. After giving away far too much work for too little, I had to earn a steady paycheck and went to work in a call center for barely over minimum wage.
There I met my wife, a beautiful woman whom I remain utterly befuddled as to why she chose me to spend her future with. We had two children while I moved to working as IT for a large city government and then for an enterprise service provider.
Today I'm a senior network engineer at that service provider, specializing in troubleshooting performance issues across the Wide Area Network (WAN). I also write tools, automation and audit systems to simplify the jobs of my team members and reduce human error. I love what I do; solving technical problems and engineering solutions fulfills a passion that I've had ever since those days of taking apart radios and programming in DOS.
The world was hard on technology nerds 20-30 years ago, but now it's become our playground, and we're building a future with possibilities that could never have even been imagined in the 20th century.
I'm glad to be a part of it!