31–40 of 69 posts
I was an English teacher, but I found myself thinking about death and the future daily. I went back to school for biology and learned how to program and an opportunity to study aging just fell into my lap.
It started when I first played halo CE. I decided I want to make massive space stations like halo and I realized that in the next 20-30 years that will hopefully be possible. Until then I am trying to gather all the tools and knowledge I need to lead the next chapter in space exploration and colonization.
I had goals and dreams of becoming a professional chef. Even applied for Le Cordon Bleu my senior year in high school. In the meantime I was tinkering with building websites and learning HTML and that. I built a few sites and one day a friend who taught me told me to put some playboy style pics on my site and it'll attract people to come. Being 16 I was down for looking at hot girls. So I did. Then later he told me t…
Do you still cook?
I'm a stay-at-home dad. I fell in love with my son. He drove my wife crazy. She'd rather be coding.
This is pretty cool! How old is your son now? Do you intend to remain stay-at-home forever, or until your kid(s) reach a certain age?
I'll probably stay at home forever. Taking care of the house and kids is one way I can show love to my wife. Though we might go into a semi-retired "make video games" mode in a few years (my wife tells me I'm a top-notch tester, and I have pretty good game design sense.)
Playing games, wondering how a game gets on the CD. Even though I loved it, a few years in game programming seemed like it was not "useful" enough. Transitioned to general software-, especially web-development. Started studying CS when the time came.
It's been almost 9 years since the first line of code and for now it seems like this will be the thing I do for some time.
When I was 10 years old I was going to be a biologist. When I was 12 years old I was going to be a microbiologist. When I was 15 years old I was going to be a Virus Hunter for the CDC.
Then I went to college and got a glimpse of what that career choice would actually look like as opposed to what I had imagined it would look like. I decided I didn't want that after all.
Programming had just always been a hobby. At some point though I started making money doing it and realized that I could be happy doing this for the rest of my life. The rest as they say is history.
My father. We grew up extremely poor in the midst of a civil war and he made extra income by fixing TVs and other electronics. I remember watching him measure voltages with his "old school" analog multimeter and watching the glow of the vacuum tubes and that heat and smell that emanated from those TVs. Watching him work with electronics sparked my interest from a very early age and led me to my career path
I went back to school, made a website with Frontpage for my first band (when I was 22 or something), that got me interested in computers. I self learned webstuff, later landed a job in web but decided to study computer science at a university to trully understand what I was doing. Now I am a Linux programmer in the car industry.
So basically I got cold feet.
When I was doing my undergrad, I didn't really like programming. I took many of the core CS classes, though, because I really wanted to do embedded development. I just wanted my degree to be electrical instead of computer engineering because I felt an EE was going to have an easier time getting a job in the rapidly imploding dot-com bubble. Plus, I actually liked the physical aspects better; one of my two backup plans was to become an electrician.
When I got into a real job, though, I discovered real-world programming was more interesting than what I was forced to do in class. Additionally, I got introduced to the world of FPGA and CPLD programming. While my first position was hardware production support, I pushed to move towards signal processing. After 3.5 years I managed to switch programs.
Unfortunately, the program I switched to turned out to be a black hole. It was a DOD program that required special clearances to work on. I found out much too late that this effectively made me a prisoner of the program because getting people cleared was so difficult and expensive. Furthermore, I could say so little about what I was doing that I could hardly get interviews, let alone sound competent in the few I did get.
I took my current job out of desperation. I had been searching for over two years and basically took the first offer I was able to get, which was a small local company. It was a domain I had never worked in (NLP) in a language I had never worked in (Java). It has worked out pretty well, though I can't get as interested in NLP as I was in signal processing. Unfortunately, I think I am trapped again as I get recruitment pings about once every two weeks from my new world but can't get the time of day from companies in the old one I left reluctantly.