I grew up on the mean cul-de-sacs of Troy, Ohio, USA. I first started “programming” at the age of five on an Atari 400 when I used BASIC to draw an ASCII picture of robot with wheels on his feet.
Why the emphasis on feet with wheels? At the time it was a big deal, I didn’t have wheels on my feet. That forced me to walk everywhere, which as a little kid with short legs was a total drag. It would have been much cooler to just skate around.
I went to college at Xavier University and got a degree in computer science after switching majors a bunch of times. That’s where I first got into Unix after we downloaded the early versions of Linux and I discovered that even in its incomplete state it was still more fun than VAX/VMS.
These days I work as an engineer at Seapine Software where I’ve been for the last seven years. Prior to that I was at .com-ish joint that imploded on itself. I even spent a little time programming at an ADSL broadband provider.
Most of my focus now is on writing code for a super secret future product. In my prior development life I spent lots of time on the Mac but I also did Windows and Linux work. Language-wise the biggies were Java, Objective-C, various scripty type languages and more C++ than you can shake a pointer at.
Someday I hope to revisit my BASIC robot on wheels and maybe update him a little bit, perhaps with some tank trends or maybe a jet pack.