I wrote my first program when I was 13 on an IBM 386 running DOS. It was a program written in QBasic. It filled the screen with a plain text message drawn in every color possible which played a "beep" each time it printed the text in "random" tones. Then I joined marching band and got into music. And I did not touch programming again until my JR year in college after my then fiance suggested I major in computer science (c 2006). Finally, after graduation and a 6 month internship with a popular package delivery company, said company offered me my first job. It was a full-time position with the human resource department. I inherited an application that was half-way completed and written in a language I had zero experience in. In addition, the single other person that I had the chance to work with was leaving the company. So I had 4 weeks of part-time on-the-job training. Up until that point, my resume was filled with various restaurants and theme park tenures... Needless to say, any legitimate company was taking a risk in hiring a person who's only relation to a server was the title of server itself.

Fast-forward 3 years, I heard of an opportunity with the information technology group which seemed like what I needed for my professional career development. And I took it. And the company took a chance in me.. but it was not without sacrifice. I had to pay my own relocation expenses and uproot my wife and kids. I'm happy to say I survived and have adapted to life on a team. The structure at the enterprise level is amazing - most importantly, I'm learning from and with experienced developers what working on a software team is like.

The end.