The first time I got a computer was when I was 13 and it was a hand-me-down with Windows 98 and a 25GB hard drive. I hooked it up, turned it on, and very excitedly started surfing the AOL. Back then I was a huge fan of the NuRock band Linkin Park, so I was obviously in their fanclub. They had a private, “members only” chatroom where I met some really cool people. I met this one person that wanted to have his own fansite for Linkin Park and he asked if I’d help him build it. So I studied day and night until I got it down. I hand coded an entire site, figuring out PHP, HTML, and a little bit of JavaScript.
The website went absolutely nowhere but we had fun making it.
So somehow I started visiting an AIM chatroom called “b0red”. In it were a fee hackers and just some regular people. So I made friends with most of the hackers and they actually stopped someone from attacking my computer. My firewall caught them, I gave my hacker friends their IP, and they took care of them, no questions asked!
So they introduced me to something called “C,” “C#” and “C++”.
And I blew it off because I didn’t know what it was. So I totally blocked it out of my memory. I thought it was something hackers used to do bad things and I wanted no part of it.
But I could feel that I wanted to be a programmer. I wanted to build programs and be one of those people making a bunch of money doing something they love.
So I went to community college with the Major of “Computer Programming”. Then I changed to “Network Specialist.” Then I changed to “Network Security Specialist.” Then they dissolved that degree so I just dropped out.
So here I am today, working on learning that C programming language stuff and starting my journey to be a programmer once again. I’m right back to my very first career aspiration: programmer. So I’m only programming small apps on the iPhone (or should I say, WILL be) soon, but I’m about to start doing something I love to do; and I’ll be making money for doing it!
I’ll be setting up another blog soon in the name of my “company” and blogging about my journey, and Sometimes I might even give away an app or something.
Right now there are two things I can assure you of. The first, and most important, being the fact that I will not let anything stand in my way. This is where I’m supposed to be or God wouldn’t have put me here – back at the beginning.
And the second thing I can assure you of is this:
I can’t wait.
