When I was 8 years old, my step-father brought home a computer from work, which had a 486-DX2 processor, a Hayes modem, and MS-DOS. In time, he loaded up a few games for us to play; and although those were fun, I couldn’t help but wonder how they worked. After asking a few questions, I opened the Gorilla.bas file to see how things worked in Gorillas, and I was immediately hooked! It didn’t take long before I started playing in BASIC code to make the game do funny things.

The childhood interest in BASIC wore off in time, but then was renewed in my sophomore year of high school when introduced to Visual Basic (5.0). As a young man, I found myself being a very active, outdoors enthusiast during the day, while doing heads-down reading and coding most nights. This was when I started learning more about C, C++, Java, and much more. By my junior year in high school, I was writing curriculum for school programming classes. And by my senior year in high school, I obtained my first job doing technical support and programming (for which I am still infinitely grateful).

From there, I have thoroughly enjoyed a career developing software for various industries. My skills and experience has mostly been focused on software licensing, but also includes banking, web sites and applications for higher education, bill review and auditing, payroll, executive/leadership training and feedback, open source projects like CURL, and much more.