[nickbauman]

I grew up in a software company. Mom worked for a German company that designed embedded software used in automating sea ports and satellite tracking / telemetry. Mission critical kind of stuff. The company would hire developers from all over the world and they would come to Germany and often live with us for a couple of weeks before finding their own place. So many of the engineers became "big brother" kind of friends to me. One of them gave me my first computer. A Sinclair Spectrum 48k. I started using unix (running on a VAX) at work playing with their kit, too.

Mind you I didn't want to become a computer programmer at all. I would come home from school and stop in at my mom's work and all these engineers would be sleeping under their desks because a port worker had been killed when a container ship struck a pier or a satellite entered low-earth orbit and flamed out costing $100 million or something. I associated programming with tragedy and high stakes.

So I went to art school. My senior year I was spending more time in the computer lab than anywhere else. We had a lab populated with Silicon Graphics workstations and I'd written scripts to render my animation across all the machines so I could get a result in minutes instead of hours. Then the web became deregulated.

Lately I found my way into working on rail automation software that had safety critical requirements. Which is exactly what I never wanted to do and so I quit after 3 years.

I'm still in the industry and haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up.