About

A very gracious thank you to my parents who mustered the idea to take some of their savings and buy me a Packard Bell computer when I was 15. Of course I didn’t use it for more than warez for the first year. In the end though, the mere presence of a computer beside the front door that I walked through each day as I came home from school managed to calculate the trajectory I would find myself on for the next 30 years.

I started computing in the early 90s and was fortunate enough to meet a local through my neighbor who was kind enough to show me how to use a BBS. That led me to IRC (internet relay chat; and more specifically EFNet) where I cultivated a love for scripting through writing mIRC scripts and TCL for Eggdrop bots. This was almost a decade before I would buy my first laptop. I loved computer code so much that while I was working as a desk attendant at a local hotel, in my free time I would pull out my spiral notebook and literally write scripts with a pencil. Some of them made it into the computer, but more often than not it was an outlet for my ideas. It was also IRC that is responsible for me meeting a person that introduced me to Slackware Linux and open source software.

I know that I’m not the only person on the internet that has a story like this, but I’d like to simply say that if it weren’t for IRC and Linux, I would not be where I am today. Being exposed to open source software at such a young age shaped my mindset so that I didn’t just want what everyone else was after, I wanted freedom of choice for everyone. And I saw through open source that people needlessly give to the world around them with no expectation of return, and that the end goal of money was not present in their experience. In fact, there was no goal to be seen at all, and like a composer they only wanted to share their love of software with everyone else. This is my self-expression, my art form, and how I show my love to the world.

Throughout the years I’ve had the opportunity to work with startups, seasoned businesses, and some of the largest e-commerce brands in the United States. I’ve even started a few of my own.

If my story inspired you and you have one you would like to share with me, please do.