I’m Paul, a full-stack software developer from Washington State.

When I was young, my dad brought home a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, an early personal computer. My brothers and I mostly used it to play games, waiting for what seemed like eons for games to load off of a cassette tape. The computer also had a BASIC interpreter, and I learned my first computer program:

10 PRINT HELLO
20 GOTO 10

My family had a computer in high school as well, an IBM PS/2. Like the one before it, this was also used to play games. I developed a healthy addiction to the game Civilization which continues to this day. Before the Web, I used it to connect to Prodigy and make friends across the country, as well as learn a scripting language.

It was fun, but wasn't my passion. When I went to college, my first major was Philosophy. I wanted to be a writer. It was by happenstance my dorm was full of engineers, and I learned I knew as much, if not more, about computers and programming as the incoming computer science majors.

I never thought computers could be something I could do as a job. My generation was the first of my family to go to college, and like the old saying goes: if you can't see it, you can't be it.

At university, I found "my people." I had found a new passion in writing code. It was creating. It was solving problems. I was hooked.

Fast-forward to today and I've spent my entire adult life as a software engineer and development team leader. In that time I've worked for Fortune 500 companies and two-person startups. I've written kernel C code for cell phones, and I've created services and architectures that run on containers somewhere in a cloud datacenter.

It's been a long road since that old BASIC loop. Still, there's always something more to learn, and something else to create.