I've been a code hobbyist since I started programming in the late 1970's. The Commodore CBM (with the 40x40 attached monochrome monitor and cassette drive for loading and storing programs) opened up a whole new world!

Since then I played with the IBM 8086 with PC-DOS 3.3, Visicalc and Wordstar and the dual 5.25" floppies and an impressive 20MB internal harddrive. I begged my parents for a RAM upgrade, which they graciously bumped up to 256 KB. In 1985 I The Apple IIe arrived on the scene and stole my interest.

I've always been interested in electronics, programming, music, and anything that has knobs, settings, adjustments, buttons and switches. I enlisted in the Air Force in 1989 where I had formal electronic technician-level training, and that's where I bought my first computer... a blazing 80486 DX2 with a rudimentary Windows 3.0 running on MS-DOS 5. I ran ANSI-based 2-line BBS chatrooms/gaming sites, so I upgraded my UART chipset and had 2 US Robotics 28.8 modems on dedicated phone lines. Awesome! Databases looked useful, so I bought DBaseIII and loaded it.. and after months of playing with it I learned absolutely nothing with nothing to show for it.

This is about where my interests in networking started... tokenring, star, BNC cables, all the craziness back then.

After the Air Force I went to engineering school and learned how to build a bridge. Not quite inline with my interests or experience, but I do enjoy construction and structural engineering was a nice mental playground.

When WinNT / IIS / VB6 became popular, I jumped back into programming and developed a very nice database-driven website for my friends who had a band. Lots of great features built from scratch.. an admin area where bandmates could upload photos, message board, calendar of events, mass-email to registered users with upcoming shows. When .NET arrived I delved in and quickly lost my way. I just didn't understand OOP.

Now I am a consultant engineer for large-scale construction projects, called in when things go awry. About 6 months ago I decided to get a Mac and thought I'd learn PHP. Lots to learn starting from basically scratch... Linux, PHP, Laravel, SQL (again), and I'm loving every minute of it! I'm currently developing a website that will enable a user to log into Youtube and select videos for the purpose of easy full-screen playback. So, OAuth 2.0, API's, authentication, programming, what could be more interesting?