I unwittingly began down the path to becoming an applications developer (Internet based applications, to be specific) at a very young age.

The artistic side came first; I doodled on everything in site. Trucks, tornados and airplanes being the initial inspirations for my work, I later found comic books and an appreciation for the artists who drew them. Initially, I began by tracing the work of artists such as Jack Kirby, George Perez and other comic art greats. Later, I learned that I could recreate their works on my own. However, no matter how I tried, I could never get my ideas onto paper quickly enough. The solution to that problem would come later...

I think I was around 10 years old when my parents brought home the Commodore VIC 20 that my brother and I had been begging for. As my first exposure to a true personal computer (one with a whopping 20k of memory, no less!), there was something mesmerizing about creating programs that would do your bidding. Here's a quick sample of my first program (I never did get tired of it...):

10 Print "I am great"
20 GoTo 10

Type "Run" and hit enter and what you had was a screen full of self aggrandizing text that inspired me to pursue a greater understanding of computers. Those first few lines of code soon evolved and became more complex until I had an understanding of conditional logic and other core programming concepts. Nothing too useful came of my programmatic doodling, but I did discover that I seemed to have a real knack for computers and the logic required to bend them to your will.

Eventually, my interest in computers died down and a few years passed. I found myself in line to enlist in the military. In the middle of my aptitude tests, the government discovered my latent talent for things computer-like and I ended up becoming very intimate with computers on a scale of which I was unfamiliar with, mainframes. It soon became apparent that these behemoths were actually little different, in terms of their fundamental concept, from my good old VIC 20. Six and a half years passed and I managed to save a lot of time and money for Uncle Sam by creating programs to automate just about every aspect of the day-to-day operations of our mainframe environment. More significantly (for me anyway), I was exposed to the Internet and all of the information therein.

FTP, Gopher and Telnet were the Internet vehicles of the day, but the information to be found was no less interesting. I spent a considerable amount of time navigating from Gopher site to Gopher site and I was continually amazed at the amount of information to be found. I soon began to think of the Internet as an extension of my brain. Little did I know how much easier it would soon become to tap that information.

The World Wide Web snuck up with little fanfare. I think it was 1993 or 1994 when I first used Mosaic (later to be known as Netscape). The WWW didn't seem that much better than Gopher, but boy did that change soon. I quickly found out how easy it was to create these "web pages" and built my own personal page that I used to store all of my frequently visited sites and any other information I needed to keep at hand around work. Those initial pages were nothing more than text and hyperlinks, but it wasn't long before images became part of the standard and that's when my real interest began (and also when I discovered the solution to the problem I mentioned earlier).

Through my wanderings on the Internet trying to find something to allow me to create images for my pages, I came upon the software package "Paint Shop Pro". Finally, software that would allow me to transfer ideas from my head to the screen with a minimum amount of pain! Looking for an outlet to express my creative desires, I soon found one in the shape of one of my first post-military employers. I created a corporate web site for the company on my own time, showed it to my boss and soon found the site live on the Internet.

That first site is long gone (as are quite a few of the others I've done), but I still enjoy nothing more than the creation of something from nothing. I've long since learned to enhance my sites with scripts and database connections as well as my self-created imagery (now created in the more powerful application, PhotoShop). Doing so, has allowed me to bring everything full circle. My knack for computers, combined with a love for art has turned out to be the perfect combination for a career on the Internet.

I know that few people find a career doing something they love and seem to have a knack for. I count myself lucky.