I was introduced to development in middle school when a friend of mine got me into HTML. I took some programming courses in college, but wasn't satisfied with how slow and repetitive the curricula were, so I bought some advanced programming books and taught myself. I've been working in IT for my father for the last 6 years or so, and have done development in VB.NET, C#.NET, Silverlight, Java, PL/SQL, Android, and most recently Groovy and Grails.

I also have experience managing Windows Server and its core built-in features including Active Directory and Group Policy, Remote Desktop Services, and Hyper-V. I also manage an Oracle Linux 6 server and run Arch Linux as my primary desktop at work. I prefer KDE to GNOME, and I can't wait until they're done porting everything to the Wayland architecture because X.org really, really sucks especially compared to its Windows and Mac OS counterparts.

I'm not a Windows 8 hater, but I'm still puzzled by the decision to completely remove the start menu, especially on Windows Server. The start screen is fine, especially since 8.1, and the myriad utilities that cropped up to bring it back render the decision mostly moot now, but it is a good rule of thumb to deprecate a feature before completely removing it to ease the transition for users. I guess this isn't the first time, and probably won't be the last, that Microsoft accidentally alienated most of its install base.