| Started playing shareware games in late elementary school/highschool (win 2k/95/98 era). Kazaa and ilk were fun, though I had to debug a couple viruses with windows/AOL support since my grandparents weren't very technical. That eventually led to HTML multiplayer browser games (ogame and similar were popular in high school.) Once I figured out what F12 and greasemonkey could do, I had a lot of fun making shortcuts, auto-assignments, etc. I didn't love Flash games nearly as much because I didn't know how to interact with them. I had a couple geocities sites around this time, but had no idea what a backend or database was despite really wanting a visitor counter. Bachelors in college taught me mostly backend stuff. That led to a lot of data scraping for various things, some of which went further than others. The most intense scraping was for a major collectible site that eventually CSS-sprited all of their text; cracking that was fun. This particular project was for a hobby of mine so my friends and network could get some price advantage on large moves by the major vendors; I was in/just out of college around this time, so the money part was important to me at the time. This data passion later shifted into personal financial tooling after college for my own unmet needs around investment. I skipped the masters+ stuff and was happy to go right into industry. Work went from internship->job in backend (java) to ops (db admin of a mongo cluster on misc unix machines) to my current fullstack python/javascript set of roles. I mostly skipped FAANG stuff since I didn't want to stop hacking on my personal projects, but many of my college friends have had great success in those companies. Now: Recently switched out of one of the large tier2 micromobility operators into a different vertical. Getting back into "hacker" mode after a multi-year hiatus for personal stuff. Love: doing things, impact, perf problems, interviewing, stitching together data sources (Quandl/crypto, collectibles, games, economy data), etc. Advising an investor on whether they should care about this new "blockchain" thing for their financial services startup was pretty fun too. I love being able to spin up small MVPs quickly with tools like React and Mongo. |