I love computers. I’m one of those lucky few who grew up in the right time and circumstances to have access to the latest computer technology. And since my mom really didn’t let me play much video games, I had to use them intelligently.

Growing up, my dad had an Atari ST at home that he used for a bit of work and tinkering around. He let my brother use it once in a while, and we loved playing games that came in the mail on 3.5″ floppies (the ST had an OS burned into ROM, but apps had to be run off floppy, since there was only 1MB onboard RAM). These were some of my favorite games to this day: Buggy Boy, Karateka, Kickoff Soccer, Pac-Mania, Mouse Trap, Bentley Bear, and many others.

After that, we had a Mac SE/30 clunking around the house. This was the first machine with a hard drive, so I could actually save documents I was working on (or high scores in games!).

Around 1997 (I guess I was about 11), I would occasionally go to work with my dad. He’s a professor at UW, and being an active researcher, he had a computer with Internet and email. One of my hobbies was bird watching, and at the time I had a pet brown-headed parrot. I liked to search the Internet for info about birds. This was my first exposure to the Internet.

I started programming at the end of eighth grade, in TI-Basic on a TI89 graphing calculator . This soon blossomed into a full-fledged hobby, and I began to move on to other programming languages.

I got a HandSpring Visor Pro PDA running PalmOS at the beginning of High School. Soon I was programming in SmallBASIC, a Basic environment for PalmOS. From there, I eventually picked up QBasic, Fortran, Forth, Pascal, Plua, and a bit of C++ on PalmOS and/or Windows.

At the end of high school, my brother and I started a band. Chris was really into Linux, and he convinced me to go halvesies with him on the components to build a custom Linux workstation for recording our first CD (we were too poor to rent a recording studio). We ended up running Mandrake with a custom kernel  (from CCRMA) for low latency. This was way before I really understood how Linux works, but I really learned a lot just by tinkering around. (I also learned KILLER Kolf skillz.) We still have this computer and use it occasionally, although by now we’ve upgraded the OS and hardware several times.

We also wanted to have a website for the band, but again were too poor to pay a web designer. So instead we did it ourselves. Chris started learning some HTML and CSS to put together our first website. After he was a sophomore at the University he got too busy to keep it updated, so I took over. This forced me to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

When I finished high school, I went to UW-Madison to study computer science. In my first semester, I took CompSci 302 [Intro to Programming], where I learned Java. Using this knowledge, I discovered that one can make Java Applets for web pages. This led me to discover PHP and SQL: I re-did the band’s site using these, and started developing several websites for myself and friends. 

Over the years, I really grew to like PHP and SQL. Probably because (1) they are free, (2) they are popular and widely used, and (3) they are extremely powerful, if you know what you’re doing. In 2006, I started a web development company with my brother. He focuses on layout and graphics; I focus on web app programming. The various projects I’ve done have forced me to keep up with web technologies. In one I have to learn a smattering of Flash, in another I need to use AJAX, in yet another I build a FaceBook application. I’ve also gotten to know Joomla, Drupal, and Wordpress pretty well.

At the University, I’ve been studying more theoretical aspects of computer design and programming. I’ve learned about operating systems, computer system design, graphics, cryptography, data structures, algorithms, numerical analysis, and a lot of other cool concepts. Along the way, I’ve picked up Java, C, SVN, MATLAB, and other cool things.

A few semesters ago I took CompSci 540 [Artificial Intelligence]. We did some really cool projects, like building a decision tree for predicting a representative’s party from their voting record, and searching through spaces of solutions. I really enjoyed the class, now I’d like to learn more about AI.