I've been working professionally as a software engineer for over 20 years. My journey first began in the early 1980s. My brother got a Commodore VIC-20 for his 12th birthday. I was 7 at the time and wasn't allowed to play with it. One day while he was out playing with friends I snuck into his room to play a game one it. I loaded in a cassette tape and powered it on, but only got a prompt. I picked up the manual to try to figure it out. After about an hour of messing around with various commands I had forgotten all about the game and just wanted to do more cool stuff with the code I had learned.

Fast forward a few years past my first PC with a modem (RadioShack Tandy TL-1000), the discovery of BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems), Prodigy Online, AOL to 1994. The computing world is exploding, the internet is starting to move away from "that things computer geeks hang out on" to "this is the future" and Computer Science degrees are starting to gain increasing attention from the world. As luck would have it, I was thinking about college and a career at that time and the prospect of getting paid to do logic puzzles for a living was a no-brainer for me.

My first programming language (after BASIC) was C/C++. I bought a book and taught myself how to write and compile programs. I began learning everything I could about the internet and the protocols that made it work. Suddenly the real world potential of my passion came into focus and my brain was teeming with ideas.

Now almost 30 years later, access to the internet is pervasive and a lack of internet access is the exception. Connected isn't a question or a goal, it just IS.