 Hey, what's up everybody? My name is Brian. Welcome to the channel. I've been making lots of developer type videos lately and I thought it was time that I made a video talking about my past experiences so that people would know why they should potentially listen to my advice on things and kind of where I'm coming from with some of this advice. I'm a self-taught programmer. I've been doing this for 20, 25 years or so, a long, long time. I've seen lots of different technologies and I really try to stay up to date on the latest stuff. It's very difficult because there's so much new stuff coming out all the time for the front end or the back end or for the DevOps space or for the AI stuff that's really, really big lately. It's very difficult to keep up with everything, but I really try. So even though I may look like I'm a little bit older, believe me, I have a lot of experience and I can help you with some things. So make sure you subscribe to the channel. If you like that type of thing, give this video a like if it helps you out in any way. And so let's get into a little bit of my history. All right, so let's get started back at the beginning. The early years, the 1980s, the dinosaur age, I started out with a Commodore 64 when I was around nine or so, maybe 10. I'm not really sure. I learned a basic, typed a lot of things out of the back of magazines to try to get some programs to run. Pretty interesting. I enjoyed that time at school. We had the TRS-80, the Trash-80. We had the Apple IIs during that time, the usual things for kids growing up in the late 80s with the introduction to computers and things like that. I loved it so much at home. I had my own bulletin board system, a BBS, which for those of you that don't know is like a message board system where one person can dial into your home phone number at a time and connect and look around, post messages, and then sign off and then someone else can log on and do the same thing. So I won't go too much into the distant past here, but if you guys have any comments or questions about any of that stuff, make sure you leave them down below and I'll try to answer some of those things. But suffice to say, it was a great start. I appreciate my parents for getting me started in that type of thing. So then we move on to the 90s, the age of the internet. Of course, we had AOL. We had Earthlink. I had an Earthlink account, so I actually had actual internet and not just the AOL application. I spent a lot of time building PCs, building my own PCs, building PC for friends. So that was kind of fun and learning about RAM and processors and disk drives and all of that type of stuff. So once we had the internet, we had HTML. And so that was fun, creating some basic HTML web pages. I think the most exciting thing you could do was like a marquee or something like that. It was a little bit later until we had JavaScript. And even then beginning JavaScript was just kind of doing some little funny, annoying things. I suppose we had like form posts and things like that that we could do with HTML. But you had to know something on the server side like CGI or something to be able to actually gather that data and do anything with it. So since there weren't any real jobs doing this type of thing, at least in my area, I tried to find ways to practice this and to get some more experience doing this. So I played music. I was on a band. We actually were on a record label in a small town and we created a website for the record label. That was a lot of fun, very educational. Obviously, I created a band websites for my band and all my friends' bands and you know, a couple of other little forward thinking businesses maybe gave me a little bit of money here and there to try to help them get a website or to have some type of a presence that you could maybe find through Yahoo or something like that at that point in time. But suffice to say it was still more of a hobby and nobody was willing to pay very much for this type of thing just yet. So let's jump on ahead to where real life starts for me in the early 2000s. By this time, I was married and had a kid on the way. This was the very beginning of 2000 and I needed to try to find a job in this. So I got rid of the music stuff. I got certified in Microsoft Visual Basic pretty much over a weekend and found my first job as a contractor at a larger place, a larger healthcare company. I was writing ASP, pre.net and SQL, HTML reports, that type of thing. It was interesting. I've never really done it before but I spent a lot of time on nights and weekends learning more about it so that I was able to do my job. So after several years of the big company, the commute, the long drive to the big city from my smaller town, I got pretty tired of it. So I decided to start a business with another associate of mine and we branched off and got some customers. I wrote what they call a learning management system which is basically just a way of tracking if people complete courses or not. We sold that. We created courses using like Flash or Authorware or just straight JavaScript at that point in time. So as those of you who have worked in startups, it's hard to do that. It's hard to keep things going so we wound up ending that and I went to work for another small company that was fairly successful. I wasn't great at sales but I was great at making things and they were good at sales and needed somebody to help make things. So I moved into that company and I've actually been there ever since, a little over 15 years now. So the small company that I joined had a similar type application. It was written in .net and they were translating it to Java through some pretty genius code that one of the employees was writing. So I had the opportunity to continue working with .net which is what I had done previously. A lot of .net, a lot of my SQL, a lot of IAS and so I started learning more Unix and Java, Tomcat, all of those types of things, my SQL. It was a different world, somewhat similar but different. So those were all great experiences in the early days. I pretty much started in support before I was a full-on developer and so I got to work with lots of customers all around the world helping them integrate our software into their applications. So that exposed me to lots of different ways of doing things and lots of other technology stacks that our customers were using. This whole time just like my whole career before it, I was constantly learning, learning, spending nights, spending weekends, any extra time that I had away from the family, I was learning new things. So as we move into the 2010s, I guess we'll call that, still at the same small company, kind of moving up into more of a senior level developer I suppose at this point in time. We started working with things like AWS, the cloud. I was allowed to do some mobile stuff for a couple of customers. I got to learn iOS, Objective-C. We did some Android stuff with Java Kotlin. I got to write some Google App Engine stuff with Python. That was all interesting. I really love learning new things and so this was really kind of scratching that itch and allowing me to create products in new things. So I was constantly learning and I was never really getting bored. So of course, the downside of this is you never really become an expert at anything. You kind of learn just enough to be dangerous in lots of things, but not really enough in one thing to be just awesome. So I don't know that I would really recommend that these days, but it worked for me. Throughout all of this time, more JavaScript, more APIs, more MySQL, more back-end stuff, more front-end stuff, really kind of becoming I guess what they call these days full stack developer. So then we'll jump into the modern day pretty much right around 2020. When most people were at home, I wanted to learn new things. I already worked at home, so the shift wasn't that big of a deal to me. I was already used to remote working and used to being productive with that. So in my spare time, I wanted to pick up some new stuff. I learned Unity since I already knew some C-sharp. I made a couple of games in Unity for some game jams. That was fun. I learned more about Unreal Engine. I learned a little bit of C++ for that. I had never really learned much C++, but after you learn several programming languages, they're all very similar at that point, just a matter of syntax. I did pretty well with that. I started to make a couple of games. I shelved that, realizing I don't really want to be a game developer. I really kind of enjoy the application development more than that, although games are fun. I'm not really much of a gamer, so I kind of have a hard time coming up with fun games or fun things to do in a game. So more about the programming side. And once I had tackled that, I was kind of done with it. There's another video here on the channel where I kind of go more in depth on that and what I liked about it, what I learned from it, and kind of why I stopped doing it. Around that same time, I switched positions my current job. I went more from a development position into more of a DevOps or security type position. We had an opening at the company, and I was interested in learning some new things, and I had lots of AWS type of experience, and I knew all of our products very well. So it kind of made sense for me to move over into that. Pretty soon, I was leading the group. And so now I'm doing more things, you know, having to manage the team, doing some more interviewing for new members of the team, more of the management things that I had never really wanted to do before, after I left my own business, I kind of wanted to put that behind me. But now I'm kind of getting to the age of I enjoy that type of thing a little bit more than the constant debugging struggle of learning something new. I do still like to program a lot. So I haven't really fully given that up, but I do it less now that I did before. These days, it's more about planning and making sure that things are done well and securely, as well as architecting other products or other solutions on AWS. So of course, along with the DevOps stuff, there's lots of learning with that. There's Kubernetes, there's Docker, there's so many different things that I've had to learn. I had some previous experience with some of these things, but a lot of it is really new to me. I had experience with Python in the past, but I'm using a lot more. Now I'm kind of learning go a little bit as well. That's a pretty interesting language, has some uses for people in the DevOps world and for server side code for sure. And then of course, the whole AI explosion, that's a really interesting thing. And I'll make a whole other video talking about my opinion of that. Can't really get into it at this point, but I use it daily. I think that it's a great thing. I'm not too worried about it taking lots of jobs at this point in time, but I do think it's a great tool for people who know how to use it. We'll talk more about that later. So that's pretty much my tech history. I have a lot of other music stories to tell, but we'll just keep it to the tech for right now. I hope that you enjoyed this. If you've stuck around this long, please give it a like if you did enjoy it and subscribe if you want to see more videos of me talking about things or showing how to do some different things. Appreciate you watching and check out some other videos on the channel.