Once upon a time…
Our family got our first computer in 1988 when I was 10 years old. It was a Packard Bell 8088 processor that had one of the first commercial hard drives. It had 1MB of RAM (a lot for those days) and was pre-loaded with DOS 3.33. We’d asked for a computer because a few of our friends had them and we wanted to play the games at home. At this point in my life we owned an Atari 2600, but not the much more coveted NES.
On Christmas morning we unboxed the computer, turned on the screen which began to glow. The screen supported CGA graphics which I learned only supported four colors on the screen at once. Most games at the time were either text-based or very rudimentary. Nobody in my family had any clue on how to use a computer and it led to some disappointment right away. We had no idea how to load a game and all we could see is a blinking cursor:
c:\_
Fortunately, as we nosed through a game we also received as a Christmas present, we found some instructions. After entering some commands into the computer we’d finally get to enjoy what we’d hoped for.
The Basics
As time progressed, the games sort of got boring and buying a new one was not really something you did on a whim (especially since I had no money). I looked around in some of the included “stuff” that came with the computer. I happened upon a book entitled “GW-Basic” which was full of words I couldn’t understand. I found a disk with a label that contained the words “GW-Basic” on it. It turns out this was my first immersion into programming. GW-Basic was indeed basic. Using this language/IDE required you to enter your own line numbers. I had to be careful to space out the numbers or risk having to renumber a bunch of lines to squeeze in one more.
I went on to write some text-based games in my free time because I was a bit of a loner and could spend hours making a computer do what I wanted it to.
False Start
We never got another computer at home. I went to college in 1996 where I made first contact with email and the internet. I started as an accounting major and quickly lost interest and switched to computer science. In 1996, object-oriented programming was still in the early stages and my university had not yet adopted Java. I ended up learning a language called Ada 95. Ada 95 is what they used (at the time) for missile guidance systems.
I ended up having a few life struggles around this time and in 2001 I barely got out of school with my associates degree. In my spare time I started writing websites with Perl. I was struggling to find a full-time programming job because all of the local businesses required a four-year degree. It was at this time I joined the Army.
Basic Tech Training
The Army for me was a gift that I couldn’t comprehend or fully appreciate until I moved back to civilian service. I was a 31S which is the Army’s way of saying “Satellite Communication Operator/Maintainer”. It required a six-year enlistment minimum due to the amount of time and training involved.
Over the next six years I deployed to support the war in Iraq and Afghanistan three times. I was a paratrooper and highly trained in Cisco networks. Being in the Signal Corps, I helped maintain everything from generators to rack servers to VOIP phones.
It was during my times back in garrison (home between deployments) that I picked up PHP. I got married and started a family with my new wife. This was also the beginning of the end for the military. I was now looking to transition back to the “real world”.
Hello World
In the final weeks of my time in the Army, the only job I had lined up was a TSA Officer (yep searching your junk at the airport). In the 11th hour, I finally was offered my first paid programming job. This was in 2010, and I was now 32 years old. I was made a junior developer at a wireless phone reseller and got a very practical lesson on everything about how an IT shop supports a retail shop. They used a PHP stack, disallowed any JavaScript, FTP’d everything to the server and didn’t use any sort of source control.
Back on Track
One of the many benefits of the military is the GI Bill. This helps veterans pay for school. Since I’d only had an associates degree, I decided to go back to school and earn my bachelors degree. The curriculum used .Net Framework WebForms. At the time, my peers at the PHP gig definitely were Microsoft haters. And I would be lying if I didn’t sort of have a level of disdain for M$ at the time as well. Since C# was apart of the curriculum, I pressed forward learning about it. It turns out I fell in love with C# at that time. I like it so much that I sought out another job (after mustering some courage) and took a job as a .Net developer in 2012.
Career Management System
That first .Net job led me to a CMS that is called Umbraco. I cut a lot of my teeth working with that system. The most satisfaction about working with that system was being able to create and publish plugins. There’s a really good feeling when someone can simply download your code and solve their problem.
Over the next few years I used Umbraco to learn the ins and outs of .Net FW. In 2016 I finally decided that I had grown out of a CMS-centric community and decided to lean heavily into the FinTech world which turns out to be my most enjoyable area of work.
Contemporary Times
I’m now working on a SaaS product with an amazing amount of peers/coworkers. We are using the latest Dotnet solutions and modernizing things all the time.
I’m hoping this newsletter offers you a bit of insight as I plan to post thoughts and ideas around problems that crop up on my journey. I will focus on Dotnet dev here but I’m also an Etsy shop owner and an avid woodworker.
Drop me a line and don’t be a stranger.