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https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/1677319058037907460/vid/888x426/b-HBqxeTXE31uvKB.mp4?tag=14

Well, I haven’t done an #introduction since joining Nostr, and nostr:npub1r0rs5q2gk0e3dk3nlc7gnu378ec6cnlenqp8a3cjhyzu6f8k5sgs4sq9ac said it was like confession, which tickled my Catholic heart, so here it is.

I’m a software engineer/jack-of-all-trades who specializes in industrial controls and automation software. 3D visualizations, motion control, network and IPC communication, serializing large datasets, stuff like that. It’s incredibly boring work that does really cool things.

I started coding when I was 12, and was working full time by age 14. Interesting story there for another time. I was provoked to learn how to code when my friends all got Tamogatchi’s (those digital demons) and my parents could not afford to get me one. Determined to not be left out, I endeavored to write one for myself. I started on MS-DOS 6.22, with QBasic. About two months later, I had an ASCII art creature that I could feed, and it shit all over my screen. Close enough.

With child like enthusiasm, and with an old computer, I decided to jump straight from that to programming my own version of Windows in QBasic. I’m sure I don’t need to explain why that didn’t work, but I did succeed in making a multi-modal user interface toolkit for terminals (yep, still ASCII… I learned about Turbo Vision much later). A family friend introduced me to the VP of Research and Development at a small controls company, and he hired me on the spot. My first commercial project drew 2D visualizations of data in Borland BGI - I made $500.

I was a Star Trek kid, and believed in creating technology that changed people’s lives. I’m a firm believer in the “Oooh” effect - the feeling that one gets when they hold technology in their hands and instinctively know its right and will change their lives. My first “Oooh” moment was holding an iPhone for the first time. I wanted to be a part of bringing those moments to life.

About that age I also got heavily involved in politics and church. I ran live audio for a major church in my area throughout my teens and interned in a studio owned by one of the adult volunteers. He mentored me through some rough times as I began showing signs of bipolar syndrome, which would end up shaping some of my later years. I also took classical piano through these years, which helped a great deal with depression.

Politically, I met two senators through the years and wrote a great deal of letters. I was an activist during the net neutrality era (“STOP SOPA!”) and engaged in other black-and-white thinking like nearly every young person. I was a rabid conservative youth and had a good (ill informed) argument for any adult I came across who looked like a good victim.

In adulthood, I continued my career in tech, and also interned in a photography studio for a while. I can’t say I learned a whole lot there, but I learned to love photography and to recognize good work. I enjoy pointing cameras at exasperated family members to this day.

I went through a brief but very passionate .NET and data aggregation phase, where I worked in education. We built everything ourselves due to minimal budget. The most fun was designing a scan-tron system from scratch to use a cannon copier/scanner to grade jpgs of the bubble sheets, and log scores for students in a searchable database. There were libraries out there, but we chose to do it from the ground up to learn how it worked. The entire GUI was in WPF - a gui toolkit that I still think was before its time and underrated.

Politically I’ve changed into something of a cynical constitutionalist who’s on the border of black pilled. I still work in automation, and still work in C++ (and I still miss C#). I was on the edge of giving up on social media when Edward Snowden mentioned Nostr right about the time I was planning to delete my Twitter account.

Nostr is the first time I’ve been involved in something that made me go “Oooh” in a long time. I have high hopes of contributing in some meaningful way to it’s growth. It feels right, in a sort of unquantifiable way that excites me. I’ve learned a lot of new things (server admin, stuff like that) and met some people who have challenged my comfort after 20 something years in tech - and provoked me to improve again. It’s fun and it feels like coming to life again.

Well this is long enough. There is a little about me. I hope to get to know you all more over time. Thanks for being here, and for being authentically you.

#introductions