Becoming a developer

I was fortunate growing up to have parents that appriciated technology as much as I did. As long as I was being constructive, they always supported me and my computer hobbies. Me and my dad used to go to the South Jersey Expo Center everytime a computer show was in town. I would load up on random parts and software CD's and then rush home to spend the next 2-3 weeks glued to my computer.

I was into all the big games back then; Diablo, Warcraft, & Quake. But I was never as into playing the games as much as I was into trying to reverse engineer them. I couldn't tell you how many times I had to re-install one because I broke it trying to make my own edits to the source code. Eventually I caught on though.

I think I wrote my first program in Visual FoxPro? Or maybe it was Visual basic? I was probably 12 or 13 at the time still using a 56K dialup modem, but once we upgraded to cable and I got my first real taste of the internet, I knew web programming was my calling. My friends and I would trade off pieces of source code like it was gold. Then we'd all compete to see who's webpage would get the most page visits. I think Eugene won with his South Park Backgrounds website.

When I was 16, I got hired by the largest paintball distributor in the world. I thought that was pretty cool. I started out just doing graphics for them, but eventually they let me develop a lot of their satelite urls. Around the same time I also got a 2nd job working for my high school building servers and networks, running cable, troubleshooting computers, and doing upgrades. Looking back, these were probably my two favorite places to work.