How did you get into the computer world? What's the story?

[ayu]

gaming seriously sucks nowadays, especially when you are into FPS games like I am.....paying 70 bucks for Call of Duty, which I finish on hard difficult within 2-3 playing sessions (5-10 hours), and even those few hours were actually pretty boring? no thanks....those games aren't even worth pirating...

I'm having this really weird downtime now with games. Can't find anything that really satisfies me anymore :/. Sort of waiting for the Halo games to come to PC though. Think that will be pretty fun.

[bad_brain]

try Hard Reset Redux, most fun FPS I have played in a while:
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and it's just 2 bucks this week!

[ph0bYx]

aahh yes. The Warcraft custom maps days. Sort of miss those days.

Things were simpler x)

Talking about the good old days

OT: joined suck-o :p
Okay, I was into computers prior to that as well, but suck-o solidified the love

[ayu]

try Hard Reset Redux, most fun FPS I have played in a while:
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and it's just 2 bucks this week!

oh, I might try that out! : O

[Dr-Chambers]

It's interesting hearing your guys' "origin stories". You're really dating yourself there, bad_brain

How things started for me? I haven't thought about it in ages. It started when I was 9 years old, in 1999. My parents had just bought a home computer, for something like $1,500. It was a Compaq Presario. I even found a picture of the exact computer:

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/user ... -73868.jpg

It ran Windows 95 (I'm still not sure why it didn't have Windows 98...), and it had a whopping 2 gigabyte hard drive! I soon became fascinated with the thing, and would constantly ask my mom how to do things on the computer. Eventually, she showed me how to read the Windows help files. You know, the purple book icon with the yellow question marks

Sometime around 2000, I remember my dad opened my bedroom door and found that I had the computer completely taken apart, with all the pieces spread across the carpet. He didn't say a word, just shut the door and walked away . I'm lucky I didn't fry any of the components!

Fast forward to late 2001... I was 11. I entered script-kiddie mode around this time. I was interested in "virus-making tools" that turned out to just be viruses themselves. If I remember right, Sub7 was the trojan horse virus of the day. I got myself a copy of it and played around. I remember it could open/close your cd-rom drive, which for some reason I though was super cool

I do remember that all those "hacker" programs always had a custom skin and for some god-awful reason, techno music that played when you ran the program. Man was it annoying.

It was also around this time I discovered programming... mostly Visual Basic 6 stuff. I think it was common in virus making at the time or something. I think this was when I realized that if I wanted to really make anything, I'd need to learn to program. But... I didn't have the patience to dedicate myself to learning anything substantial just yet.

Mid 2002. Some asshole named... Jean Roma broke into my parents house and set it on fire. Nobody was hurt, but that Compaq was history. We got a new computer, a dell. I remember it had a Pentium 4 processor, 256Mb of RAM, and it came with Windows XP. Man that was a pretty sweet computer at the time, I was super stoked when we got it.

Anyway, it was around this time I picked up HTML. Tell me, what programmer do you know that didn't start with fucking HTML? It's like a rite of passage or something...
Well anyway, I remember I made my very first website on I think it was called Xanga?
At any rate, I spent a good amount of time playing with HTML and eventually some CSS and some basic JavaScript too. I soon made my second website, which still happens to be around to this day: http://supersaiyanshrine.20fr.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; . I never said I was good, folks.
I don't remember the login to that thing either, but honestly it feels like a piece of history to me now.

Sometime starting in 2003 or 2004, I joined a site called "hackthissite". After a couple failed attempts at learning C++, I eventually learned quite a bit about some real hacking stuff like SQL injection, manipulating login cookies (some websites just store the logged in username in a cookie, making it really easy to become "admin"), etc. I also picked up PHP at this time, thanks largely to some of the community members of hackthissite. Personally, I credit the hackthissite community with showing me what hacking really was about, and pushing me past the script-kiddie phase.

Year 2005, I joined suck-o. I was 15 years old, and a cocky little shit. Just look at my first post here on this website, if you want proof.
It was around this time I was refining my PHP skills, making some of the wargames for suck-o, IRC bots, flat-file database forum systems. I even made a primitive OCR program using PHP. In my opinion, it was around this time I actually started to become a good programmer. I learned to shut up and listen to those wiser than me, rather than to speak the loudest. Its a valuable quality.

Skip forward to 2012. I moved from the midwest USA to Los Angeles, California. I'm still not sure if this was the best or worst decision I ever made. Perhaps both, but that's neither here nor there. Anyway, i got a job there as well... the IT guy, I guess, for an electric company. I did everything - network admin, network installation, Windows server admin, Linux server admin, embedded system development, software engineering... Hell, I even reverse engineered some software for those cock-suckers. I was under-paid and over-worked. But I also gained something that is extremely valuable in this industry: being well-rounded.

One of the best things you can do for your career is to be good at a lot of different things with computers. Believe it or not, but most people in this industry specialize in one thing only, which limits your value to a company. If you can do more, you get paid more. Simple as that.

The down-side to California is it is a place where trouble finds you, very easily. Long story short, life got complicated and drugs seemed like an easy way to help cope. For 3 years, I wasted my life on drugs, which ultimately led to a long downward spiral for me. They sure as hell didn't make a damned thing better for me.

Year 2018. I moved back home to the midwest. I found a job at a nice little start-up company, which I still work at currently, that does biometric access control systems using facial recognition. My official job title is "Embedded Software Engineer", I write the face recognition and verification code as well as the communication protocol between the face scanner and the server, and some other stuff. I'm also the guy they call when shit breaks... or if they need a Linux expert. Remember what I said about being well rounded?

Point is I love my job, and I get paid pretty well to do it. Doesn't feel like work at all, most days. But I probably wouldn't be here now if I didn't walk the rather "rocky" path that led me here. I regret a few things, but I wouldn't change anything that led me to where I am now.

--------------------------

Sorry guys, I didn't mean to write a whole book in a single post...

Don't be sorry thank you for sharing. Be free to share some more, it really made me reflect on a few things. Your dad is the MVP in this story, if he had reacted when you took the computer apart, you'd probably would have lost interest or got discouraged.

[Dr-Chambers]

aahh yes. The Warcraft custom maps days. Sort of miss those days.

Things were simpler x)

Talking about the good old days

OT: joined suck-o :p
Okay, I was into computers prior to that as well, but suck-o solidified the love

Thanks for sharing but when did the love of the computer start though?