I have always had a deep interest in computers. My family's first computer was an Apple II GS, which I used mostly for gaming. My interest in gaming led me to develop my first program, which was an imitation of Zork and was written in Basic. When I was in High School, I bought a Pentium-based personal computer, and quickly became enamored with the Windows Operating System. Unfortunately, the version of Windows that I used was highly unstable (Windows 95), and that prompted me to constantly troubleshoot the random problems that would arise. I quickly became the fix-it guy for my friend's and family's computers.
I spent several years in the work force before attending college. I was employed as a field technician for an environmental engineering firm, where I applied my troubleshooting skills to maintain control systems for remediation units. This, coupled with my interests in science, mathematics and computers led me to study the discipline of computer engineering. I returned to programming and found that I thoroughly enjoyed developing applications. I decided to pursue computer engineering rather than computer science because of the focus on low-level hardware and physics was very compelling. I earned my master of science in electrical and computer engineering in 2010.
After graduation, I worked on my personal programming projects while seeking employment. I began developing a genetics algorithm that created digital logic circuits based on a set of user-supplied criteria. This project proved to be very challenging, and although it currently works, it is still far from perfect. I continue to tweak the algorithm to this day.