About

In college, at a cruicial point of deciding what career I wanted to go into, I sat in front of the school's monochrome Vax VT-100 terminal and asked myself "can I do this for the rest of my life?".  To that, I said "no".

That was before Microsoft brought out Windows 95, before the explosive birth of the Internet and before mobile phones were even a concept!  Little did I know what was coming in the near future (then) and how the entire face of the industry was about to change.

I taught myself Microsoft Access while working in Accounting and made sure I had the answers (and printouts) at my fingertips when managers from the IT department came asking questions.  This led me to move to IT as Data Warehouse Specialist.

It taught myself ASP classic to distribute the information in the data warehouse to the sales force distributed across the country. In addition to using

At home I switched to using Linux and programming in PHP (since that worked in Linux) which led me to being given charge of our external websites and servers at my current location. The servers started out as Drupal running on FreeBSD, but have since been moved to run on Linux.

I've noticed this pattern of each career improvement has stemmed from something I've taught myself, so never stop learning!  I'm still learning things myself, and taking advantages of classes I am sent to for work. Sometimes they help to "fill in the gaps" of how things work, or best practices.