How do you write an introduce yourself to a new community without bragging or being self-deprecating? Tough job, let's see how I do.

Early years, or "how I started coding"

I started coding in my early years on a Commodore 64. I had a poker game that I was getting really frustrated at since I kept losing. Instead of learning to play poker better, I dug into the BASIC source code to make it so I would always have a royal flush. Not very sporting, but probably better for my long-term career than getting really good at gambling at an early age. In high school, when my dad told me I wasting my life "playing computer games" while I was learning to program it lit a fire in me to prove him wrong. I'm pretty sure he'd agree he was wrong.

Career, or "you're actually going to pay me to do this?"

I've been a software developer professionally for two decades, bouncing from job to job much more frequently that I would like. I've gotten to the point where layoffs don't scare me. Take the severance and run. That being said, a little stability would be nice. I've worked for some really large companies you've probably heard of (Google, IBM, Intel) and some smaller companies you probably haven't. I've worked in many different programming languages, primarily PHP. Despite its warts, it is always the language I come back to, partly because I know it better than the other languages I've developed in professionally, like Go and Python, and partly because it's just so easy to get things done in.

Despite having stage fright, social exhaustion, and imposter syndrome, I have spoken at a bunch of PHP conferences (Lone Star PHP, Midwest PHP, Ski PHP, and ZendCon) as well as my local Meetup. I find giving back to the community that so freely gave educational material to kickstart my career very important, and am continually humbled that the community puts up with me.

Hobbies, or "stuff that keeps me from coding"

Outside of software development, I have two hobbies that suck up most of my time and disposable income. I play ice hockey on a few beer-league teams. I started when I was thirty years old and it's been one of the more rewarding pursuits in my life. The camaraderie of a team is something I've missed since high school, and it helps keep me in some semblance of shape so my other hobby doesn't destroy my body completely. I'm also really into craft beer, both drinking it and brewing it. I have zero interest in brewing professionally but do enjoy pouring my beer at tech conferences.

Steemit, or "why am I here?"

So what brings me to Steemit? I've been aware of cryptocurrency since sometime in 2009 when I went on a ski trip with some coworkers. Kousha was fascinated by this whitepaper from a person named Satoshi and spent most of the drive home to Mountain View from Tahoe talking about it. The road trip actually seemed a bit too short; I wanted to hear more. But life got in the way and I didn't think much more about it for years. Then at a conference, I ran into this guy named Luke that had the same fascination with cryptocurrency and more broadly in the blockchain. His interest was infectious, though again, I didn't make time to really get involved. I did manage to buy a little bit of Bitcoin and have been thinking of places to shoehorn the blockchain in. My professional work has not been a good fit for the technology, but I hope to eventually build something with it.

I used to have a blog, but the lack of interaction on it kept me from really working hard on it. It looks like the Steemit community is much more active. I'm not sure what kind of posts I'm more likely to write here. I used to be into creative writing (stories, poems, etc). Perhaps I'll bring some of that back. Perhaps I'll stick to the more technical topics I'm interested in these days.