Too young to be a developer and geek?
Hey guys,
Its not a horse race. At 16 I was experimenting with the ircu source code, website development, and MUD programming in C. I taught myself how to install, use, configure, and security harden Red Hat Linux (Vanderbilt distro sticks out in my mind for some reason) and Slackware. At the time, those were the big ones. My MUD creation had could draw in a crowd of dozens of players at a time and was a derivative of CircleMUD its still on SourceForge. We published the source code when we got tired of it. We spent almost 6 months to a year rewriting the code from scratch for "version 3" of the MUD while simultaneously taking version 2 down. This was a big mistake, so on 12/19/2000 we published the code for people to use. This code was a tall order, and when it was working, we had an interactive ASCII world map, tons of features, and all sorts of weird nerd stuff.
I can say I was a developer 13 years ago, when I was still 15. I was a founding member of a very successful Internet Relay Chat network called "AfterNET" and even gave it its name (AfterNET.org). I must have been 14 or 15 at the time. We wrote a "Constitution" of how the IRC network should behave and I was a major participant in every decision that IRC network made for years. Back in those days, I never disclosed my age.
Even before that, at the age of 12 years old, around 1995, I was on America Online role-playing in Star Trek groups on Wednesday evenings after school. I remember playing Doom and Quake. I remember Novel NetWare being used at my high school and thinking of how slow it was just to login and how there had to be a better solution.
My professional career starts later, but I even ran a web hosting company from 1999-2001. I designed the entire website and coded an accounting system for payments in PHP at the age of 16. The company broke even in 2000 but never really caught on and lost money (directspeed.net). You can look at the Internet archives to confirm this. I shut down shop around early 2001, right before the Sept. 11th attacks.
Was I a professional anything back then? Not really. But we all start somewhere. Once I got to working hard (and then learning that "working smart" was more important according to one CEO), I kept going. I got certified 7x to prove I knew what I was doing and completed 3 years of forensic psychology. I was certified by Microsoft as a MCP, MCSA, MCTS, and MCITP in 2 months. The only reason it wasn't sooner was because I had to work and couldn't get to the exams fast enough
I'm grandfathered in as being perpetually certified as Network+ and A+ from CompTIA. I have a great background in project management, system administration, and working in IT. Today, I run these forum networks. As part of that deal, I work extensively with business leaders, site members, and I'm taking that a step forward by going to the Microsoft MVP Global Summit next year and doing more NDA work with Microsoft, vBulletin, Crawlability, and other companies. I've worked for government and I've worked for private business.
But times are'a changin. When I was your age I bought my first cell phone at 16 from AT&T. It looked like a blue banana.
Its not a contest! Don't pigeon hole yourself with labels. There is a lot for you guys to look forward to. Needless to say welcome the forums!