-Throughout my career I've straddled the line between system administration and programming. My first few jobs were all related to maintaining various sorts of computers: desktop PCs, UNIX-based machines, and so forth. It wasn't until folks needed websites and realized I knew how to program that my career slid over into programming. From there I learned Perl, SQL, databases, and HTML. At that time the web was new so we were all learning at the same time. I leveraged my Perl knowledge into several jobs doing web-based programming. Perl is a language that is both simple and complex. Perl and CGI made it incredibly easy to get something displayed to a web page. Where it is complex is the syntax for things like regular expressions, and the tendency for Perl programmers to value code that does multiple things on the same line. There was also a lot of value placed on code that was clever, which lead me to wonder on several occasions if I was clever enough to be a Perl programmer.
+My journey as a programmer started when I was in elementary school. I became interested in computers after reading about them in the World Book Encyclopedia and hoped to work with them some day. What I didn't realize was that those encyclopedias were out-of-date and only showed the larger, more expensive mainframe and mini-computers of the 1960s and not the more modern microcomputers that were introduced in the late 1970s. When I realized that an Apple ][ was a microcomputer and that it was designed for the home market I began my quest to get a computer of my own (AKA: I started dropping not-so-subtle hints to my parents that I wanted a computer). I scoured magazines like Popular Computing and Byte Magazine looking for the right computer; from the Commodore VIC-20 and Sinclair ZX-80 to the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model III (Even the Rockwell AIM-65 or Heathkit H89 would have worked. I wasn't picky back then.) My dad took me to computer stores and I marveled at the variety of machines that were there (and likely made a few sales-people nervous as I poked and prodded the new and rather expensive machines). Finally my dad picked up an Atari 400 computer with tape drive, and I began learning BASIC programming in earnest. Around the same time my school opened a "computer lab" with three Commodore PET 4032 machines (complete with floppy disk drives), and I found myself spending every moment I could with those machines. In high school I took two programming courses, one in BASIC and the other in Pascal (which was my first exposure to procedural languages, and the basic concepts of computer science). In college I majored in Computer Science with a Bachelor of Science and did my best to keep up with all of the things that they tried to teach me. Unfortunately, I wasn't a great student (especially in mathematics). I struggled with and later dropped my compilers class, and felt like I was falling behind where other students succeeded. Most of our classes used Pascal, which I was becoming more familiar with, but there were a few classes that used COBOL, Ada, SNOBOL, C, and assembly language. I graduated with modest scores and returned home.