It all began with coffee.

Well, maybe not quite exactly. But coffee has been there every step of the way in my coding career. Even before I was old enough to drink it, my Dad instilled both a love for solving problems and the mug.

When I was ten he showed me how to code simple html web pages running locally on our old Gateway PC.

A few years later, when my friends had their own MySpace and Xanga sites, I developed my own custom coded website.

As high school came around and I wanted to be “cool” by joining the basketball team, I’m certain I was only kept on the bench because I wrote a custom PHP app for our league to track games, practices and coach communication. If only I knew about SaaS then…

To me, coding was like breathing and I never thought I’d make a career out of it. Who would get paid to breathe?

In college I opted to pursue a degree in business, though inevitably it was coding that made me thrive at work.

To me, coding isn’t just a skill or abstraction of computer science philosophies. It’s a tool, dare I say “silver bullet”, that allows you to help solve problems. Regardless of the platform or language, there’s a business need at the core that I can use my gifts to make peoples’ lives better.

That’s what coding is all about for me.

My Dad isn’t with us anymore, but I’m grateful for the love for people that he gave me, a love of coding with which to help them, and of course, coffee.