…about how I ended up doing what I do now (part 1)

(Fair warning: This is a long story, and one that you might not care to read. Feel free to stop anytime.)

I’ve been programming since the beginning of middle school, so that makes it a total of about 12 years. As stupid as it sounds, I actually had wanted to be a magician, but every time I was practicing my card tricks, my brother would call me upstairs and ask me a computer question. He loved playing around with the computer (keep in mind this was back when the Internet wasn’t close to mainstream and there wasn’t much you could do on a computer). For some reason, he was obsessed with organizing his contacts and friends’ birthdays.

It started off with Excel. Then I learned about Visual Basic. That was an eye opener. The idea that I could build something from nothing was extremely fascinating to me. Since I didn’t have much of a social life and, living in an apartment with no friends nearby, didn’t have much to do outside, I spent the vast majority of my time reading and playing around with the computer.

I met a friend in middle school, Ara Mahdessian, who was also into programming. He overheard me talking about programming with our middle school Algebra teacher and he approached me. We had completely opposite personalities but we somehow were able to work very well with each other.

In high school, we started a company – Blue Media. We got our first client and made them an accounting system for their business. It was actually pretty damn good for a couple of teenagers. Then we got our second big client and made a web-based company management system for him. That took a lot of time and, in retrospect, was extremely overkill for what he wanted to do. We added accounting, inventory control, users and user groups, dynamic permissions, online orders, offline orders, and a whole slew of other features I can’t remember at the time. We got paid for it, but the client never even looked at it.

By the time we were done, high school was over and Ara was off to greener pastures at Stanford. We had an emotional yet happy farewell and went our separate ways.

At the time, I had decided I wouldn’t go to college just yet. I went to community college to take a few classes but had a horrible back incident that required surgery and some serious time off from school. By the time I got back, I was so behind that it wasn’t even worth trying to catch up. So I started working with our second Blue Media client and ended up staying there for over a year to help him improve his business.  On the side, I would still take on programming projects, which led me to my next job: condominium budgeting.

To be continued…