About

I was originally born in the Canadian city of Calgary, in the province of Alberta. I spent the first 18 years of my life there, living in the same house in NorthWest Calgary. My first introduction to computers came in seventh grade, when I took a course that allowed junior high school students to study essentially whatever they wanted. I chose to learn how to make web pages. A term later, I returned with a website demonstrating my newly acquired understanding of HTML. Over the next few years, I would grow my understanding of HTML and CSS, to the point where I had a pretty respectable grasp of web development.

In tenth grade, I moved on to high school, and I had my first introduction to "real" programming. The course taught Java, and I took to it immediately. Luckily, my high school had a great computer science program, so I managed to blow through all of the course assignments in a few weeks, and I went on to doing bonus work. The course was based on Bradley Kjell's Java Tutorials, although it was Java 1.4 at the time. This was a great introduction to programming, which takes it really slow through fundamental concepts. In time I would finish basically every exercise on the page.

Throughout High School, I had the benefit of the support of a really excellent computer science program, and a nice group of peers to learn Java by my side. I took basically every course my high school offered with "computer" in the name, and I helped out with the computer science club, the web development club, and the school's website. I also participating in some programming contests at this time, mostly USACO and the CCC, which was my first real introduction to algorithms and data structures. High school also saw me doing Higher Level Computer Science IB - a year long course, where I created my first really large scale software, a Java program for keeping track of student's grades. In the process, I learned a whole lot about the difference between writing short <50 line programs and writing big software.

Going away to University shook stuff up a bit for me, and not only because I moved more than 3000km away. University challenged me in interesting new ways, and it was a chance to meet a lot of new friends with a similar passion for software engineering. My first-year programming courses weren't particularly challenging (Java again), but the material was presented at a much faster pace - a sign of things to come. This led into my first work term, which was my first exposure to this "learning a new programming language" concept. It was four years between when I learned my first programming language, Java, and my second, JavaScript. JavaScript is not a very good language to learn after Java, especially since the name might make you think they have anything at all in common.

From that first work term, I've moved on to other companies, and learned more interesting new things about computers. I've worked at big companies (Facebook and Amazon) and small ones (Primal). Overall, I've found that my passion for programming has stayed constant over the years, and so I think I'm one of those unusual people who knew what they wanted to do with their lives from an early age - and was correct about it. The future holds graduation... and beyond that, full time employment as a software developer. A terrifying prospect indeed!