Born January 30, 1978 in the Bronx, New York City, it would be 6 years before I first would find any interest in a computer, or - more likely - know what a computer was. My parents had found a computer class at a Rec Center or YMCA or something for little kids; more specifically, it was a Logo class. I went once a week, generally just following the directions the instructors gave us, and it was there that I wrote my first program - basically a FOR loop that would draw a line, turn 90 degrees, and repeat 3 more times to draw a square. I remember quite clearly the day I figured out how to draw a circle - and I've spent most of my geek life seeking that "problem solved" satisfaction.
I spent the wonder years of my life playing with Apple ][s, TRS-80s, and a few other things that ran their own versions of BASIC. Eventually, after *years* of begging my parents, I got a Tandy 1000HX for Christmas - and it was off to the races. In between Global War games and ahem file sharing on BBSs and every single game Sierra produced with a title ending in "Quest", I was writing more BASIC programs to solve nothing in particular. Once I hit middle school, it was Borland's Turbo Pascal where I really started writing "real" programs, mostly to help me get my math homework done more quickly. :) Once high school hit I graduated to Turbo C and C++, and once I got pointers figured out it was all over - programming was what I wanted to do, and (hopefully) eventually get paid for it.
That led to me attending Virginia Tech as a Computer Science major, interning at Nortel (which gave me my first taste of cubicle life while I got use the brand new Perl 5 to parse Excel files), spending my summers at Walt Disney World as a World Famous Jungle Cruise skipper, eventually graduating in May of 2000 as an Interdisciplinary Studies major, with Computer Science and Business minors. From there, I managed to land a job with Microsoft, as a Developer Support Professional, debugging IIS/ASP Classic hangs and crashes along with fixing just about every way a sysadmin could break an IIS 3,4, or 5 installation. I did manage to write one of the most popular KB articles of the IIS 5 cycle, for whatever THAT'S worth these days. While I was there, Microsoft launched a new development platform, the .Net Framework (perhaps you heard of it?). I was able to take a few internal training classes while .Net 1.0 was still in prerelease - and my programming bug was reborn.
After I left Microsoft, I bounced around a few different companies as a software consultant in North Carolina, one of which was good enough to pay for me to attend PDC 2003, which led me to start blogging actively, most (if not all) of which has been migrated to this here blog. However, I was always keeping an eye out for jobs back in the NYC area, and was finally able to return to join the cadre of NYC financial company developers with Credit Suisse. I had started to tire of the years of contact work though, and the lack of health insurance made me feel like I needed to wear a hard hat 24/7 - so I looked for "full time" work, and found it at Avanade.
I've worked with Avanade since 2006 (minus a short break to build a website for Barnes & Noble), and I'm still there now, as a Software Development Manager in the Information Worker space - also known as SharePoint work. As anyone that's launched a new SharePoint install at a company of any size, they can tell you that it's 50% development and 50% soft-skills work to get people to actually USE the darn thing. It can be frustrating work to be sure, but it's still as satisfying as ever to finally hit that "problem solved" moment.