READY
FOR
WORK!
Where did I come from?
We have to hark back to a Friday in late September, 1981, and me having just started grade 9. Due to a weird scheduling issue ond day that would make a great story on its own, I was permitted to cross the threshold of the computer room to pass the time one afternoon. It was just a repurposed science lab with a U-shape of tables around the class with a dozen Commodore PET 4016s hooked up to a few casette decks, a dual 5-1/4" floppy drive, and a dot matrix printer perched upon them. Seeing as Friday was "Game Day", a devious method of allowing students one day a week to just play games, and upon getting bored, learning how the games worked in BASIC. (Alas, as more games using impenetrable machine code came into being, Game Day was eliminated from the schedule well before grade 11 and my first official computer course.) Someone from an upper grade showed me how load and play a 2D high-low game called Urkle, and the rest, they say, is history.
I would have to wait January 1983 until I was granted permanent after-school access to the computer room. I devoured every Commodore PET BASIC book I could find in the school and public libraries, and started the neverending process of learning how to code. Wrote some pretty nifty text-based adventure games during that era, though I ended up making them so incredibly huge, they became way too complicated and convoluted to ever finish, including "Treasure Mall", where you walked around a three-story mall collecting capitalist treasures and hope you find the shopping carts so you can carry more goodies, and "The Kremlin", where you walked around the Kremlin collecting Communist secrets, with a really nifty moving wall basement where you had to chance your way out and hope you didn't run into the Minotaur.
Once I discovered the wonderful world of POKEs, I started the crafting of a program that would make a different sound with each key press, the idea being to make a synthesizer. Alas in those pre-Internet days I was never able to find the match between the POKE numbers and the actual notes of a real keyboard, and so the project ended unfinished. I did annoy the hell out of my classmates though, with my program's constant crashing as I was developing it, leaving the computer room filled with the high-pitched squeal of a crashed PET.
I was such a geek at computers back then that, incensed at only earning a 98% in grade 12 computers at the end of the semester, I voluntarily took the final exam worth half my grade (which my school allowed back then, and they were extra nice in that if you graded less they wouldn't count it towards your final grade), and finished my grade 12 computer class with a 99%. So there!
Where am I now?
Unfortunately I followed my heart instead of my head, and didn't earn the computer science degree I was so clearly (in retrospect) meant for. So after graduating with a BSc in Astronomy, I turned 180 and became a graphic designer instead. I would still be working in front of a computer, though using software instead of crafting it. My education was right in the middle of the transition from hand skills into the digital age, so the three years of perfecting how to unclog a 00 Rapidograph pen were for naught. Luckily the graphics program I took at Cambrian College allowed access to a little old Mac Plus (1 MB of RAM with an external 20 MB HD) in the back room that was crowded with a soon to be dismantled photo typesetter (another victim of the computer), and I was once again devouring books, this time on Aldus PageMaker 4.1, Aldus FreeHand 3.1, QuarkXPress 3.0, and Adobe Photoshop 2.5.
The Internet exploded into our consciousness in the summer of 1995, and while I did sent my first real electronic mail via a BBS I belonged to in 1994, I got my first "real" email address (steve@feldspar.com) from an ISP in August 1995. It went out of business a year later in those early years as everyone was trying to figure out how to make money as the onramp to the information gravel road. But had I known the career I could have made of it back then, I would have dived head first into web design. I did dabble a little bit, writing my first web page in SimpleText from the example given in a 1995 MacWorld magazine article. Then I created a personal website using a Mac-only semi-WYSIWYG HTML editor called Pagespinner. From there I worked with Adobe GoLive, then Macromedia Dreamweaver creating a few static websites along the way.
Where am I going?
You mean besides crazy, trying to cram an infinite amount of knowledge into a finite brain? 😜
The future started for me in September 2018 with an evening of JavaScript put on by the local bootcamp as a clever way to find students. Even though I had used a little JavaScript, Perl and PHP on some of the websites I had worked on, that was mostly cut and past to get some job done. What I was doing that evening was really programming for the first time since university. AND I HAD A BLAST! Especially since I was twice the age of anyone else in the room, and I completed the final Fizz Buzz assignment first!
It took some stumbling and bumbling trying to learn Python and Data Science on my own before I finally gave in and joined that bootcamp's next cohort of C# .NET students. My attempt at learning Python really helped me during the C# phase of the course, but that .NET half was a killer. And it got me ready to the jaw-dropping discovery that there was sooooo much more to learn than what can possibly be taught in 12 weeks.
With some trouble finding my forever home and an extension of my unemployment benefits, I'm joined another bootcamp, this time gaining front end skills to go along with the backend I learned previously.
So now I'm once again looking for my forever home. And I'm feeling confident.