[tylerlarson]

I'm 33 now. I was an artist/painter. In about 1998 I started messing with computer animation. I went to art school and found my computer experience was more useful and stopped painting. My animations slowly became scripted with, Director's Lingo, Flash's ActionScript (a flavor of ECMAScript), and Maya's Mel(a flavor of C). Through all of these I learned the basics of programming and I was able to get work far exceeding what I ever dreamed of being possible as an Artist. I was interested in the internet as a place to make creative things and was able to get paid creating for people. I graduated college in 2004, the first real salary position I had was at a large advertising agency I got through a recruiter. I stayed for a few years doing work for huge clients and learning how to program and design better end products. In 2005 I joined an ActionScript user group and later that year started a company with two other friends from this. We learned Ruby on Rails and accepted any work we could find. We never quoted enough, we never agreed on anything, and we all learned a lot before totally failing. Through this I helped build a few MVP's for some startups. When the company folded I jumped from one startup to another building larger and more well crafted applications. Through this time I kept going to meetup groups and all of my work connections have been through relationships with people that I have met at them. I've been at my current startup for 5 years.