| I started programming in about 7th grade. A website/game I enjoyed was Neopets. Neopets allowed you to create grounds called guilds which had HTML pages you could customize, so I learned HTML. Later on I started playing Minecraft. I was interested in running a public server and creating a community, so I learned the basics of system administration (ssh, ftp, bash, linux, website domains, etc.). This was extremely helpful, practical knowledge that gave me many advantages over my peers in school. In high school my server grew more and more. I learned about virtualization vs bare metal servers. I set up a website and forum using off-the-shelf software (XenForo, Apache, MySQL). I did small front end programming tasks in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. When I needed to learn more I did just that. Aside from the technical aspects I also learned things like web design, game design, Photoshop, the importance of backups, and managing a community. At some point I wanted to write my own mods for the server. Java was intimidating, so I used Skript which was a scripting language that could perform actions in the game. This worked for a while, but I quickly outgrew it and sought to learn Java. I wrote several mods for the game and published a few with success. I learned more and more Java. It was an excellent time where I learned the basics of programming and programming languages. I learned design patterns like Singletons and connection pooling. I learned how to use event based APIs to write handlers, how to use file system apis, how to keep data in memory & persist to disk. I learned how to use git/GitHub to share my work and version it. I kept on running. A server until I entered college as a computer science student. Around my freshman/sophomore year I started to lose interest, so I shut it down. I college I found classes to be extremely easy, so I didn’t spend much time on them. I spent time on projects and solving problems I had. I wrote many different web apps, created a smart thermostat, and wrote better interfaces for my schools atrocious websites. I had an internship my freshman summer at a packaging plant. I did data entry and wrote small scripts/programs. My sophomore summer I studied approach. Junior year I applied for an internship at AWS on a whim, and much to my surprise I got and interview and eventually an offer. I interned at AWS that summer and received a full time offer. I worked at AWS after I graduated and stayed for about two years. I started my current job at RStudio yesterday, so I can’t give much info about that yet :) |