I'm currently a software developer living in the Seattle area with Microsoft to claim as my employer. I grew up on a farm in a fairly remote part of Idaho and took an interest in software development at an early age when I began to reverse engineer games on our family's Tandy computer. During the day most of my time was spent outside, working on the farm, or going to school... but at night I spent time learning as much as I could about how software worked, how I could tweak it, and how I could eventually write my own.
I started out with learning the BASIC language when I was 12, and used it to develop a rudimentary 'chatterbot' AI that cemented my interest in emulating human interaction centric AI. from there i began learning many other languages and technologies such as C/C++, PHP, Javascript, HTML, etc.. In junior-high school I developed and released several projects for donation based profit, including a web-based web site statistics tracking system, a forum system, and also a news/content management system. I also developed and released a well reviewed and widely used application to help facilitate file transfers for those with limitted connection speed (including myself on a 56k modem). At the time the web software ecosystem was still very young and undergoing rapid innovations, so as a teenager there was a 'market' for most of the software I released to help web developers control and manage various systems... With most of my projects being donation based, they were not making me moniterily rich by any means, but to me as a teenager... several hundred dollars was a lot.
As the amount of software development knowledge I gathered began to increase, I spent much of my time experimenting with completely new things... I wrote my own interpretted language parsers, contributed to various open source game engines and modifications, and just generally branched out across many different development opportunities. But while I was thriving with my own personal development, I felt I was being held back considerably by school. In high school I clashed with teachers who didn't stray from the approved ciriculum even when students wanted to challenge those boundaries. I felt for the most part the school system was merely teaching people how to memorize predefined solutions to predefined problems, and did little to help students solve new problems using their own free thoughts. So against the guidance of just about everyone in my life, I dropped out in my junior year...
Things were not easy for a while afterwards, but soon I began to explore software and its opportunities even further. I began writing and publishing libraries and Windows UI controls for other developers to use. I continued experimenting with new projects, and also new methods for monetizing my development time. Through online services and personal connections I began to take on short software development contracts, developing everything from video encoders to search engines for newspaper archives... I also started a CS degree at a local college, but after about a year I realized that our town's local college was not providing me much in terms of new knowledge and skills that I could not learn on my own, so I dropped out and took on a day job (often from dawn to dusk) as a farm hand. After work when I was not spending time with friends and family, I'd spend evenings developing applications, libraries, websites, etc... some of which eventually caught the eye of a manager on the Windows Media Center team at Microsoft. One thing led to another, and in January 2007 I found myself moving to Seattle to start a one year contract with Microsoft. Eight months later I was made a full-time employee when the principal manager of the Forefront Team asked whether I wanted to join his team per recommendation from my previous manager. I've remained at Microsoft ever since...
Currently I develop infrastructure and tools for the Antimalware team, where I introduced a new high throughput and highly automated test infrastructure system in 2009 which is still in heavy use today with ongoing improvements and capabilities. It's a rewarding position, but over the years I feel I have lost sight of personal projects, so I'm looking forward to voyaging back out into the universe of the unknown... where I'll be using some of my spare time to engage in experimental and fun projects. To 'get back to my roots' as they say...