Age 14: I played a lot of Commander Keen. One day while playing, I decided I wanted to make a video game. I found that way to make a game is to learn how to write code.
Age 15: I tried to learn QBasic. I didn't know what I was doing. I failed.
Age 16: I took a visual basic 6 class in high school. I thought I knew what I was doing. I didn't.
Age 17: I took an intro C++ course. I struggled. My mindset was in VB, so the transition was difficult. I barely passed with a C.
Age 18: I sit down and commit to really learning C++. I make my first game in Direct Draw. It was a 2 player space ship combat game (asteroids style). I start a web development business as a means to raise money to start a game studio.
Age 19: I start attending community college and take a few additional programming classes. I am mediocre. Business isn't going well. I join the Marine Corps and go to boot camp and training for 6 months. Country goes to war in my last week of boot camp. oops!
Age 20: I resume community college. I get an internship as a network admin at a financial company in seattle. It's the tail end of the dot com bubble.
Age 21: A vietnam vet from my unit calls me up and asks me to go to war in Iraq with him to work as a web developer. I quit my new job and go to Fallujah to write PHP code out of a tent. I teach myself PHP and MySQL. Three months later, my app is done. By the end of my tour, I had built a PHP/MySQL web app from scratch to manage $1 billion worth of reconstruction projects. Riding on that success, I went to the US embassy in Baghdad and made a version of the same app to manage the logistical supply chain of all goods coming into Iraq. I completed that in two weeks, it tracked another billion dollars worth of goods. It was my greatest accomplishment to date.
Age 22: I return to community college, and take more programming courses. I'm starting to get the hang of it.
Age 23: I suck at math. I keep getting a C in Pre-calc 2 because I don't know how to properly study and teach myself hard math. I can't seem to memorize the trig formulas. More schooling! My web design business is almost a complete failure at this point due to a shortage of clients.
Age 25: I go to Iraq again, for 1 year. I work as a sys admin for the information management office at the Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters. I am exposed to sharepoint for the first time. Our sharepoint admin leaves, so I take over. I am exposed to virtual machines and transition our whole server room to VM's. There are some problems, which causes a few 36 hour shifts.
Age 26: My military enlistment ends. I return to community college. I forgot a lot, so I have to spend some time retaking classes (Calculus and data structures).
Age 27: I transfer to the University of Washington to get a degree in computer science and software engineering. I discover philosophy and decide to minor in it.
Age 28: I graduate with a 4 year degree. I don't know what to do now. I'm living off of my meager savings, trying to invest it to make it last. I mostly play games and try to make my own in C#/XNA for a year while half-heartedly looking for work.
Age 30: I get hired to work for General Dynamics through a friend. It's a job where I train soldiers how to use the state of the art command and control software (called "Command Post of the Future" CPOF). My salary was $61k/year. I tell my boss about my programming experience. Six months later, I'm in Afghanistan working in the knowledge management office as a "Sr. Sharepoint Developer". It's mostly just a glorified HTML coder, with a few custom webparts.
Age 31: A fellow contractor worked for Trace Systems, another military contractor. I liked the way his company took care of him. I quit GD and get hired on at Trace for an offer I couldn't refuse. I work in Afghanistan for a total of 18 months (12 hours/day, 7 days/week). In my free time, I start working on a game engine. I dump 98% of my earned money into investments.
Age 32 (now): My investments have done well. I have lots of money. I can finally do what I've always wanted and have been setting myself up for: making my own game! I continue working on my rudimentary game engine from my bedroom. 10 months later, I hire an artist, scrap my engine and switch to UE4, rent out an office space in downtown seattle, and start working really hard on my first commercial game. By this point, my former weaknesses in programming and mathematics have become my strengths (though, there's still a lot to learn!). Despite all my setbacks, my #1 redeeming trait seems to be a very high level of persistence (and maybe risk taking).
What's next? Who knows.
