[sjg007]

I started fixing PCs when I was a kid, I even started a PC repair and networking business. This all happened because my parents had a PC and I would tinker with it, break it and have to fix it before they got home from work. I also had a few friends of similar aptitude so we would all work together.

Quickly moved on from Windows to Linux systems. Got a job at 16 writing bash and Perl scripts as well as HTML for the local University. This was right around the time of the web taking off in 1997. I was lucky to have early Internet access at home etc... I then picked up python at some point. It wasn't until University that I finally grokked C++, Haskell and later Java. If anything I had too much hubris but in reality, I had always been afraid of programming because I felt it required too much math. I was also deeply unaware of the business opportunities in retrospect at every level... I think I thought things were supposed to be harder or difficult to be a real business. PC repair and networking certainly wasn't scalable though.

Today I work in machine learning after going through grad school. The best part of grad school was being exposed to the problems and working with really smart people. This was in the early days of bioinformatics. Today I think there's even more opportunity but it was foundational in retrospect.

Today my kids are working on Roblox games which I hope will motivate them to learn programming. Maybe we will build some robots too. I hope the ability to see the code in action will inspire them?

I bought them iPads and chromebooks and they seem to be doing well with them. I hope they will ask me to turn off the parental controls and some point so they can get into the internals of the chromebook at some point but right now they are a little too young and are just learning to use the mouse and keyboard after the whole touch experience. We probably need touch screen chromebooks I guess.