Software Engineer

My exposure to programming began early on in elementary school when in our "gifted" class we got to play around on an Apple II computer connected to a Lego Logo set with motors and lights.

Recalling this experience, a few years later I began bringing home books from the local library with full BASIC program listings and typed them verbatim into an ancient Atari 800XL that my uncle found in someone's trash. I was the only person in the family who did this for fun.

In middle school/junior high, I took geometry and I was damn good at it. I also had math books that featured BASIC programs, so I used to take them home to type them into our Commodore 128 and pick them apart. I stopped when I realized nobody writes games in BASIC, and assembler/machine language was a little too complex for me to teach myself just yet.

After I got confirmed in my church just before turning 15, my stepdad made me buy a computer with the money I got from the congratulations cards. It seemed cruel at the time but probably was the best thing that could happen to me. My little 386 with 4 MB RAM took me through countless adventures while I taught myself QBasic and fiddled with the built-in interpreter for long hours every night.

In 10th grade it got even better because I was able to take Computer Science at school with an excellent teacher, and I learned Turbo Pascal 7.0 which gave me syntax highlighting and actually let me create .EXE files to give to other people.

At the end of Christmas break I bought and read Turbo C++ Programming in 12 Easy Lessons and so learned C++, using the sluggish, horrid Turbo C++ 3.0 IDE. Then I bought and read Creating Turbo C++ Games and had an absolute blast.

In junior year of high school I took AP Computer Science, continuing my work in Turbo Pascal. By the end of the year I had actually written a custom windowed GUI library resembling Windows 95 that I used in all of my class projects. I was fiercely competitive.

With the advent of DirectX on Windows 95, I realized the dream had finally been achieved of creating high definition games without a DOS extender or assembly language, so I taught myself Win32 development in C/C++. On the side I bought and read:

Programming Windows 95 by Charles Petzold,
Advanced Windows by Jeffrey Richter,
Teach Yourself Game Programming in 21 Days by Andre LaMothe,
Action Arcade Adventure Set: The Best Way to Create Action Arcade Games in C by Diana Gruber,
Spells of Fury: Building Windows 95 Games Using Directx 2 by Michael J. Norton,

...and used Borland C++ 5.0 to write Win32 GUI and DirectX 3.0 demos.

In senior year of high school (1998) I took an independent study Computer Science course, where I was introduced to the far superior Visual C++ 5.0/6.0 IDE and Windows NT 4.0 operating system. I swore off of being able to play games on my PC for the sake of learning NT's more advanced features.

Later that year I led a team of 4 to win the Miami University (Oxford, OH) ACM High School Programming Contest, on the birthday of my Computer Science teacher, and for the first time in our school district.

On the day of my graduation I chose to stay home and write a small Win32 app to help my employer (the local library) keep track of signups to the summer reading program. Looking back, this would have been better to implement in Excel using macros but they were grateful nonetheless.

That summer I worked at ITI as a pseudo-intern, making part-time wages debugging vast volumes of code written in C on Unix machines, which translated proprietary CAD/CAM drawing formats into common ones like the DXF format used by AutoCAD.

I was accepted into the University of Cincinnati under the Computer Science program and started classes in fall of 1998, but quickly realized that I already knew enough about my art to make money in the private sector. In boredom I started taking junior-level classes but these failed to satisfy me. I tried to have my work experience from the previous summer applied as college work credit but the administrator refused. The worst offense as far as I can tell was when I visited the department head in his office and asked if they could license the Windows NT 4.0 source code for free so I could study it; I was refused and told that there were so many other projects that needed attention, forget the fact that Windows was my specialty and not whatever else they had in mind. So I dropped out before the college year ended and returned to ITI for a spell.

To be continued...