Where Did I Come From?

It's a little late, but since my sidebar gadget text became a bit verbose, I chose to put a quick "Who Am I?" over here. Or rather "Where Did I Come From?"

In a nutshell, I'm a plane jockey turned code monkey. I've been fascinated with computers since I was young. I taught myself BASIC on a Commodore 64 (which I still have) with Family Computing magazine and learned that you could double the space on your floppy disk with a hole punch. My first exposure to "networked" computing involved CompuServe and a modem that was only a couple of generations past a phone cradle. If you don't know what a handshake sounds like, you can't fully appreciate the speed jump from 300 to 12oo baud, much less the "blazing" speed of a 56K modem.

Even though I initially didn't follow my love of computing to a career, through an accidental twist of fate, I left my airline search and ventured onto my coding path. I was working with Access databases and writing basic HTML/CSS/JS back around 1997. In late 1999, I took some time off from trying to figure out what kind of airline pilot I wanted to be, and I went to work for my brother as a ColdFusion developer. I haven't looked back.

In that time, I've done quite a bit of different things. I've installed and repaired computers. I've set up small company and home networks. I've had nightmares about wiring Cat-5 cable and can still remember the wire order (even though I haven't had to do it in almost a decade). I've illustrated and laid out magazines, billboards and even a map of an airport ramp. I configured and sold tablet computers to pilots before they were even called "tablets", and once helped a guy troubleshoot his computer while he was flying at 45,000 ft over the ocean. I've written software for tablets, for the Web, for business reporting and even a good bit of SQL. I've spent the last several years of my life immersed in highly sensitive personal background, medical and military data. I spent several years as a SQL developer, but I'm back to being a web developer.

When I moved to Nashville, TN in 2005, I became a member of my first technology user group, the Nashville ColdFusion User Group (mostly because we hosted the group and I helped with setup and teardown). I met some brilliant and talented people though that group. Sadly, the NCFUG quieted down and went dormant for a while, until a few years ago when my friend Brett rebooted the group. He asked me to be his co-manager (even though I was mostly a SQL guy at that time), and I agreed. He passed away in early 2015, and I took over the group. Since then, I've come back over to ColdFusion development, and made a move out of state. I left the group in some very capable hands, but I still have a desire to see a resurgence of the group that I was a part of for so long.

I'll be the first person to admit that I'm not the fastest coder in the world. But when my stuff goes out, it doesn't come back. I pride myself on a fairly low bug-rate. I hate writing code more than once, and I tend to be hard on my earlier self. I've looked at code I wrote a few years ago and wondered a) who wrote this crap and b) after realizing that I did, how does it still work. 

Being a self-taught code monkey, I know there are more than a few holes in the things I think I know. I've learned a lot, but there are always more things to learn and plenty of ways to do things better. Fortunately (though this blog tends to prove that I procrastinate more than I'd like) I enjoy learning. I enjoy reading. I know a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff. I just hope it's useful stuff to know. The current world is a fascinating place. Between RaspberryPi, IoT, <insertJavascriptFlavorOfTheMonthHere> and all of the other things I'd like to do, I wish there was more time for all of it. :-/

I'll likely eventually move this vanity page to its own spot, but for now it gets to live as a blog post.