Bio

DOB: 4/29/1981
Sex: M
MBTI: INTJ

Interests:
Foreign Languages (meeting foreigners)

Math
Science
Computing
Engineering

Hiking
Running
Weights

History:
Somewhere around the age of 9 or 10 I was introduced to Sim City. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen. Unfortunately, you needed a computer to run it. After a few years of begging, I finally got my parents to get me one. By this time, Sim City 2000 had come out, and my parents convinced me to buy 2000 instead of the original. But even better than the cool games was that I no longer had to write (and rewrite) 10 page papers by hand. This freed up some time -- time to do things like programming!

My parents had tried to explain to me the concepts of OS, memory, and hard disks. I wasn't quite ready to understand at that point, but that didn't stop me from taking out a book on C programming from the library at around age 12. I never made it past the first few chapters. As you probably know, without a compiler, it's really hard to learn how to program. But an even more serious road block was that I had a hard time sitting and reading due to a very bad knee injury courtesy of a very faulty Montgomery escalator.

The summer before I started high school, my dad was doing some spring cleaning when he came across his college basic programming textbook. I read it cover to cover, including the example programs. Within maybe a few months I discovered qbasic in DOS and started writing my own programs. I was shocked to learn that there were more than 20 commands and that you didn't need line numbers. I guess the language had come a long way since the early 70s.

I already knew at this point what I wanted to major in at college. Sometimes I wonder if I wouldn't have been better off going to college at that point. My basic programming class turned out to be very dull as I had already learned the material a few months before. The pascal class I took my sophomore year was a little better, but by this point I had already learned C and even a little about data structures.

Around this time I became interested in assembly. It was those C register variables that peaked my curiosity. I read through a significant portion of an online MASM assembly programming book. As I mentioned before, it's really hard to learn to program without a compiler, or assembler in this case. But I felt I had acquired a substantial amount of understanding. I also taught myself basic logic design, a little boolean algebra, binary, hexadecimal, octal, 2s complement, and conversions. This all helped to make some of my first few college courses really easy.

By the time I graduated high school, I knew basic, pascal (forgotten now), C, C++, Java, and some assembly. I was also introduced to Linux by an acquaintance. Throughout high school and until this day, my focus has been on math and algorithms. My first real experience with systems and design came at MusicRebellion. It wasn't until I was at Infraware that I began to think a little more about things like applications, design, protocols, and interfaces.