I’m a 24 year old guy from San Antonio, TX who has been into all things geeky since I was about 8. When I was around 10, my dad rescued a couple orphaned 286-based PCs from somewhere, brought them home, and let me have at them.
Letting all the magic smoke out of one didn’t stop me from actually getting the other working. I got my first taste at “hacking” by learning how to bypass the password on the dos-based shell.
Remember folks, storing the administrator password for your machine in a plain text file called prefs.ini, with the unassuming name ‘password’ is A Bad Thing™.
I was hooked. I learned basic during a computer class in 7th grade. 2 years of computer science in high school. Naval Nuclear Program after graduation. Now I work as a service engineer for Varian Semiconductor, helping support Intel’s fabs.
My parents purchased their first complete computer system from HP in September of 1995. A Pavilion 7010, it had less power and storage space than my iPhone. I remember being quite excited and impressed at the powerful new Windows ‘95 interface, and how advanced it was over the old dos/win 3.1 crap I’d been using.
We got dial-up internet soon after, with blazing speeds of up to 14.4 kbps. I can remember trying to download stuff at the speed of overnight.
Our ISP had a personal home page & builder. I taught myself HTML. Then I graduated to geocities—the myspace of 1996. I tinkered around with design and computers in general in high school. One of my teachers new a guy who had a small design company. I finally got my first taste of all the professional tools of the trade. I dumped notepad and frontpage for Dreamweaver. I cut my teeth on Flash and Photoshop. I started to learn Coldfusion.
After an entirely uneventful naval career, I spent a few months doing web design with some buddies from back home. Eventually I was forced to take a day job, but I haven’t let that distract me from my true calling.
Looking forward
I’m currently really into RoR for dynamically driven site design. I love it.
I have about a thousand different ideas for sites, and in between working for clients, I hope to get around to them.
Short term, I am also looking into acquiring my own web server, so I can have the flexibility that rails seems to need, and fulfill my own desire for independence.