A Little History
ERD Excitement!
Third grade... 1983. The excitement was palpable. I had just learned that the new school I had begun attending had a few computers scattered throughout the building, and I mean that literally. Approximately 3 computers, total. Kids still learned to type on typewriters in the junior high, and at this point, there were no actual computer classes at all... Just a few set up here and there on tiny little desks out in the hallway, which you could sign up for 15 minute time slots before or after school. For $3, you could purchase a floppy disk from the front office. Only the coolest of the cool kids at that age (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it) had their own floppy disks.
These machines captured my interest immediately. There was no computer at my home, so I started staying after school to play games on the machines. Before too long, someone showed me how you could press the magical key-combination of control-c to interrupt the computer when it first was booting. Of course, I had no idea what to do with a command prompt at first, but little by little, I learned a few commands I could use, and began looking at some of the programs that were written in BASIC. Slowly, I learned how to start programming extremely simple and small applications by studying other applications I could find here there and anywhere.
After about a year of this sort of tinkering, I had learned enough to start writing some really basic text-based 'adventure' style games, inspired by other much more professional games like Zork and Deadline. By 1985 I had nagged my parents enough to purchase an Apple //c for the house, along with a blazing-fast 300 baud modem. I was soon running my own BBS (Bulletin Board System)... Completely text-based, and basically featureless, but I was in heaven!
I lost my way for a long while once I left that school in fifth grade, and became more of a regular computer user, rather than continuing with any sort of development. Totally sad. I did not remember how much I loved it until after I'd already gone off to get a BA in psychology, and then an MA in social psychology (researching stereotyping and prejudice research). I'm grateful that I did, at long last, start going to various programming boot-camps and the like, and ultimately wound up clawing my way into the field of software development through passion, devotion, and local developer user groups in Colorado and then southern California.
I've now been a professional software developer since 2007, working on projects both small and large, as both an independent contractor and as an employee in larger companies. In 2009 I entered the world of .NET development, and while I am a big fan of the Mac operating system (since OS X, that is... I left the Mac platform around the OS 7/8 years when Windows 95 came out), I am an even bigger fan of Microsoft's software development tools. These days, I work on my Mac as much as possible, running whatever Windows operating system (or Linux, though I haven't had much need for that so far) I need in virtual machines for my development work. Being on the Mac has also allowed me to dabble in iOS development in my non-existent spare time as well.
What the future will bring is a total unknown, but my goal is to become the absolute best developer I possibly can through continuously educating myself, exploring, attending and speaking at user groups and conferences, and taking classes when interesting ones cross my radar.
These machines captured my interest immediately. There was no computer at my home, so I started staying after school to play games on the machines. Before too long, someone showed me how you could press the magical key-combination of control-c to interrupt the computer when it first was booting. Of course, I had no idea what to do with a command prompt at first, but little by little, I learned a few commands I could use, and began looking at some of the programs that were written in BASIC. Slowly, I learned how to start programming extremely simple and small applications by studying other applications I could find here there and anywhere.
After about a year of this sort of tinkering, I had learned enough to start writing some really basic text-based 'adventure' style games, inspired by other much more professional games like Zork and Deadline. By 1985 I had nagged my parents enough to purchase an Apple //c for the house, along with a blazing-fast 300 baud modem. I was soon running my own BBS (Bulletin Board System)... Completely text-based, and basically featureless, but I was in heaven!
I lost my way for a long while once I left that school in fifth grade, and became more of a regular computer user, rather than continuing with any sort of development. Totally sad. I did not remember how much I loved it until after I'd already gone off to get a BA in psychology, and then an MA in social psychology (researching stereotyping and prejudice research). I'm grateful that I did, at long last, start going to various programming boot-camps and the like, and ultimately wound up clawing my way into the field of software development through passion, devotion, and local developer user groups in Colorado and then southern California.
I've now been a professional software developer since 2007, working on projects both small and large, as both an independent contractor and as an employee in larger companies. In 2009 I entered the world of .NET development, and while I am a big fan of the Mac operating system (since OS X, that is... I left the Mac platform around the OS 7/8 years when Windows 95 came out), I am an even bigger fan of Microsoft's software development tools. These days, I work on my Mac as much as possible, running whatever Windows operating system (or Linux, though I haven't had much need for that so far) I need in virtual machines for my development work. Being on the Mac has also allowed me to dabble in iOS development in my non-existent spare time as well.
What the future will bring is a total unknown, but my goal is to become the absolute best developer I possibly can through continuously educating myself, exploring, attending and speaking at user groups and conferences, and taking classes when interesting ones cross my radar.
