Growing up I had an uncle who was living with us taking computer science at the local university, so I was lucky enough to have very early access to a computer, the internet, and many learning resources. My older brother also had an interest and taught me a few things before he decided it wasn't for him, but I kept at it. I saw "Hackers" and thought I'd be a cool hacker, but eventually decided I enjoyed building more than breaking, and also enjoyed not being in jail.

I learned from some big chunky turbo pascal manuals my brother had borrowed from his then girlfriends dad, who taught it at our local college. He lost interest in both programming, and the girl, but I kept the books.

I started by modifying "Gorilla's" (in QBasic) and playing around with extreme banana throws, but the first thing I wrote myself was a star-trek based quiz game in Turbo Pascal, when I was probably 10-12~ years old.

I think I can't keep avoiding Rust and am likely to learn that next, but I'm also looking to build up some frontend skills to be more well rounded.

IDE: I use a lot of Vim still for kind of small changes and configuration files and things like that, but for any kind of large projects are working with a team. I always prefer something from the InteliJ family.

Programming Language: I still like a lot of python for one-offs and glue code and kind of quick scripts, but any more complex work, I'm all in on Go and I'm quite happy with it.

Operating System: This is like an impossible question for me. I'm a huge operating system nerd. I really like Linux and a lot of the flavors of UNIX from Solaris through to the open BSD and BSD family. I end up using Windows and Mac OS basically every day and I will say that some of those are not my favorites, but I don't think I can pick a favorite. I'm really interested, I guess for for any particular reason is because I'm interested in sort of the software engineering history of a lot of those different operating systems, the factors that went into their design choices and the really kind of novel solutions to different problems that they have, which I think is really super interesting.

Keyboard Shortcut: CMD+SHIFT+T which reopens a closed tab and like chrome; saves my bacon pretty much every single day before I had that I would just lose things constantly and it was really miserable

Playlist/Genre/Artist: I think I listen to a lot of sort of like traditional coding music. Like if you search for like music to code to, you'll probably find a lot of things I listen to. So that's like a lot of lo fi and ambient techno and the occasional video video game soundtrack or remix, but I do also mix in Alt rock or like jazz or electronic jazz depending on my mood if I want to lift my mood or if I kind of want to slow down.

Must have app: I feel like this is silly, but Google Calendar, I cannot live without my calendar, I schedule just about everything in my life to help me remember to do it and to be able to look back on my time and understand what I've been doing with it. and it's just amazingly helpful.

Game/Gaming: I think I'll be kind of boring here and I'll pick some video games. I've been really into Final Fantasy 14 lately. I really enjoyed the story line as well as the mood and the atmosphere of the game as a longtime fan of the series. It has just been really, really enjoyable to play through.

I also play a lot of league of legends, which is what I consider my practice simulator for practicing my calm. So, you know, I do have fun in the game, but it can be very frustrating, too.