my mom married the very most stereotypical computer junkie you can imagine. The first time I met him, he forgot that we were getting dinner because he was playing Diablo (the first one) (possibly in his underwear). I first became acquainted with the insides of a computer when they bought a house and the unfinished basement became a graveyard of his old CPU's and discarded RAM.
At eleven he showed me the command line. At thirteen he showed me Linux. At fiteen I got my first job in high school building computers part time for an IT service provider. In my down time I would go onsite with the techs to be bewildered at networking.
At 20 I sort of fell into an actual(ish) IT job, which to date I consider my second favorite accident. I worked Tech Support for a local ISP, where probably the most important thing I learned was how to watch ASCII Star Wars through Telnet. Over the next few years I worked various tech jobs, and I loved it, but I didn't want to just use these tools. I wanted to make them.
I learned JavaScript and CSS, React, and Node.js. I learned all about Bash scripts and HTTP and SQL. For work I've learned TypeScript, Angular, AWS, Python and Django, Ruby and Rails. In my free time (hah) I've built a Linux box to host my own projects (including my custom Plex/SMB server). Tech makes me tick.™*
But probably the most important thing I've learned about tech since becoming a developer is that tech is totally useless if we forget what it's for. I love tech because with it, I can solve real problems that real people face every day. I can automate onboarding management so that busy PM's don't have to email their clients a million times a day. I can host movies from my house so it doesn't suck so bad when something isn't on Netflix (#firstWorldProbs). I can configure AWS to handle all my deployments so nobody has to spend time trudging through server logs.
All in all, I love tech, I love people, and I love to solve problems. So what are we going to solve together?
* not an actual trademark.