How Did I Get Here?

First things first, pardon me being all over the map in this post, it is rather general as I just write what comes to mind.

I have spend the last 5 days:

• Learning oCaml
• Writing Python scripts
• Remembering my Perl days (and writing code)

Isn't technology super fun?!  I can't say it has been a bad experience. The issues I have encountered have challenged me to make different decisions and find smarter ways to achieve short-term goals.

At my core is VanillaJS.  Back in the day, I was all LAMP stack.  I moved into MVC more and delved into PHP and Codeigniter, Zend and Symfony. Can't forget to mention the shit-pile we call Drupal and the wonderful yet awfully insecure WordPress.

I was tired of that and moved into Ruby and picked up Ruby On Rails.  Awesomeness was there but short-lived - it just didn't scale well and the developers were too arrogant for my taste. 

I originally started development without code at all - I was a designer using charcoal pencils, drafting material and eventually Corel Photopaint.  

I was an art major, I was and am still talented with art - not sure why.  I also am a music "guy" - have played drums since I was ten years old.  I also tried: Trumpet, Trombone, Saxophone, Guitar, Piano. I stayed with drums for some reason and didn't find passion in the others.

I actually learned that I wasn't an art major about one year into college. I hated the judgmental instructors who wanted to draw on my shit. I changed over to music.  Hell yeah! I'm gonna be a music major!   Nope.  That was boring as fuck and seemed eerily repetitive of my high school days; time for a change!  

I became a cartographic design major.  It seemed right, a mix of computers, art, science and such - what fun. Except that every other student in my classes had "super computers" of 1994.  I hand drew all my shit, laid lines on grid paper and used technical tape to make fancy diagrams.  I was doomed in that idea - I needed a computer!!

We always had computers in the household.  My father somehow would obtain the "leftovers" from his workplace which included an old Apple IIe, Commodore Vic 20 and some brand of MS-DOS workstation.  We also had that wonderful and loud dot matrix printer - geez were we cool!

With that MS-DOS computer we had Windows 3.1.  I had to load it from 5 inch floppy disks to run it every time; it wasn't very efficient.  I didn't really get the whole idea of the GUI that Microsoft had developed and I turned to making something useful with QuickBasic

I was collecting a lot of toys during that time.  Truth be told, I was a hoarder and scalper.  I had every Power Ranger, Spawn and Star Wars figure and I was determined to make money on selling them.

Lo and behold came my first ever website, The "ToyScout" (no it no longer exists). My goal was to buy and sell Star Wars figures across the globe. Awesomeness of the idea is that it actually worked.  I collected about one thousand dollars of foreign toys making overseas trades for my expensive hobby. I truly had the holy-grail of global modern Star Wars to later sell at conventions and toy shows.

My first programming application helped me keep track of my inventory of toys - it was awesome! I could easily lookup any item that I had and move it through my QBasic application.  I was very proud f myself.  Being the son of a great Fortan developer, I suppose I picked up something. 

I have to continue more later, this story can go on forever...