When I was 6 years old, my father brought home a decommissioned 286 and showed me how to make changes to games in QBasic. At 9, we made a replica solar system that moved in Visual Basic. I was 13 as the dot com bubble burst and I started building websites part-time for a local website design company. In the 20+ years that followed, I've watched the emergence of XHR requests turn into one-page applications, led a startup to a $5 million valuation, managed teams of hundreds of coders, published technical papers, and launched countless products. I am a software engineer at heart whether I'm coding software, designing software, or managing software teams.