Re: What do you do in real life?

[BLuRry <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

On Jan 5, 10:16 am, Gregory Weston <u...@splook.com> wrote:
> In article <z7mdnRFXMcmb6vzUnZ2dnUVZ_jGdn...@giganews.com>,
>  Boot Zero <ap...@bidlink.net> wrote:
>
> > All,
>
> > Anyone who is lurking in this forum has been immersed in technology for
> > at least the last twenty years.  Many have gone on to jobs in technology.

We got our Apple //e when I was nearly 7 years old.  I spent a lot of
time in my childhood typing in listings from Nibble and became rather
proficient with basic.  The only modem I had, until much later in the
mid 90's, was a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 -- and I frequently BBS'd quite
a bit on local Houston lines as well as AppleLink/AOL (under the
handle Someone2) -- and remember having a few fun conversations with
Burger B[ill|ecky] about the avatar before it was abandoned.  I
finally got brave enough to try my hand at 6502 asm when I was 15 and
wrote a rather nice tilegame interface reminiscent of Ultima, well the
UI and tile editor anyway.  Later in high-school my dad got a 486sx
and I switched over to the world of dos and win 3.1 (yuck!).  I spent
some time learning Pascal and more of my time was spend writing amiga-
style "Mods" under the same handle I still use periodically.  For a
period of time I was affiliated with a Houston-based demo group named
"C.L.A.N." which changed names to "Nebula" -- which ran the popular
"trax in space" website.

I studied Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and
learned a lot of the theory behind stuff I vaguely already understood
from reading Nibble.  And thanks to my experience with 6502, I aced
the 68000 asm class (which was notorious for being a fail-out class).
After graduating, I knew C/C++, Perl, and some Java.

I got a job as an associate consultant in June 2000 with Vignette, and
am still presently working there as an Architect after 4 promotions.
I mainly push strings of text in and out of databases and through
websites (content management), as well as decipher non-deterministic
process requirements into finite state automata (workflow).  I've
worked with several Fortune-500 companies over the past 9 years and
survived god knows how many layoff rounds.  I owe my ability to write
tidy, neat code while economizing resources to that little apple, and
my ability to package my code with decent documentation to Nibble.