I was born close to the very end of the 20th century on a farm in rural Tennessee. My birth took place in the same stalls that calves and foals entered the world. On my fourth birthday, I realized farm life was not for me and I was not going to become a member of the local FFA chapter, I was not going to live in the middle of nowhere, and somebody else could take care of the farm animals.
As a boy, I received a boxy beige Packard Bell computer as a present one day that had a 5 1/4″ floppy disk drive (that accepted the actual “floppy” disks) with the game Monopoly on it. The graphics were made up of ASCII art if I recall correctly. My curiosity led me to learn system commands, and through trial and error, became confident in computer skills. Considering myself somewhat of an expert or hacker at that point, I tried to see if I could get “into” the Monopoly game on the disk to see what was there. Utilizing my elite skills, I successfully wiped the disk of all contents. No, there was no “write lock” on the disk. No undo, no recycle bin. All gone. I learned an important lesson that day: make sure you use some kind of VCS (Git, etc.) before tampering with code.
Fast forward a few years and I obtained a Computer Science & Engineering degree. I have worked with and consulted with over 100 companies of different sizes (Fortune 500 down to companies solely run by a husband and wife), revenue, and in different industries. I’ve done consulting and contracting work in the areas of software and web development, Salesforce.com implementation, development, and administration, computer networking, and much more.