I came to programming (rather circuitously), via digital music production, circa 1998. I had a group of friends who made music together and had all slowly drifted away from the college town where we met. In order to keep working on music together, we had gotten into the habit of recording parts for tracks and sending zip drives and data CDs back and forth in the mail (email at the time maxed out at about 1.5 MB, so that wasn't an option). While I still didn't have my flying car or the jet pack promised to me by the last couple of decades of television, I thought we could probably do slightly better than snail mail.
A couple of hours of searching online turned up forum posts talking about using Perl to upload files to a web server... a later post elaborated and said that any computer with an internet connection could become a web server. Wheels thus set in motion, I came out the other side of a 3-day fugue with a terrifying Perl script cobbled together that let my friends post their files directly to my computer from a form I hosted at my (dynamic) IP address. I'll let you imagine the many ways in which that didn't go quite as I had hoped.
What did go right in ways I couldn't then have imagined was that I was tossed, feet first, into the deep end of a fascinating and emerging world of interconnected technology. Like so many other nerds, I had become ensnared in a life long pursuit of technical mastery.
In the intervening couple of decades, I've had the concentrated time and good fortune to learn a host of programming languages, techniques, business domains, and development methodologies. I've also been fortunate enough to work with some of the best and brightest in a variety of disciplines.
I can honestly state that I have attained a high level of technical expertise in a variety of areas… but my empathy and mild dyslexia (hooray for neurodiversity) rank first among my strengths. Experience has taught me that embracing our differences and having the wisdom and patience to meet people where they are is the best approach to accomplishing great things. But enough about me. Tell me about yourself!