I was a year out of school, and I hated my aerospace engineering job. My dad owned a company that did software development. He had one developer, and that one developer quit. So I gladly jumped on board and got to learn how to write code on the job.

In that first job there were two languages involved. I had to learn Visual Basic - back before .NET - as well as PostScript, like from Adobe. The software that we were writing ran on Windows NT workstations and produced PostScript that was sent to production laser printers that printed something like 200 pages per minute. We were doing some pretty cool dynamic data injection at production speed.

The first thing that I really got to start from scratch was actually taking that same software that was built in Visual Basic and porting it to Java, which I think was at version 1.4 at the time. There was a lot of learning in the first couple years on the job as a software developer, as I'm sure there is for most people.

These days I'm looking at things that are graph-y in nature, and trying to figure out how to put those things to work because they're very applicable for a lot of things that we do at Varsity Tutors. On a personal level, I would really, really like to learn how to fly a taildragger airplane. I would love to be able to fly to places that don't have airports and land safely. The types of planes that do that generally don't have tricycle gear like your typical Cessna.

IDE: Don't really care. I use VS Code right now. I still like Atom. I don't understand why anyone would ever choose VIM or EMACS. I'm not hating. I just don't get it.

Programming Language: Whatever I need to use to get the job done well today. If I'm relaxing, Ruby is amazing. Otherwise my answer is "anything but .NET or Java".

Operating System: For development, MacOS because it has an easy package manager and the UX is reasonable. For deployment, Ubuntu is the go-to, but I'm not really that picky with my Linux.

Keyboard Shortcut: Cmd+Z (I know. I'm a simple man.)

Playlist/Genre/Artist: Varies widely. I generally use Pandora. It will be on one of a handful of stations: Junior Brown (trucker country), Hip Hop BBQ (90s-00s rap), The Hop (by Radio Citizen, chill beats), Big Wreck (90s-00s grungy stuff), Aretha Franklin (Motown)

Must have app: Errrr...I got nothing.

Game/Gaming: Again, I got nothing.