For some unknown reason, my dad decided to try to teach me Java when I was around twelve or so. The book he got for me (from the library) was called “Head First Java,” and it had just enough silly pictures in it to keep 12-year-old me engaged enough to learn the basic concepts in the first half of the book. I like to think that the fundamentals I learned then carried over into my high school programming experiences, which included building this website, some simple Arduino programming for an A.P. Physics class, and some ungodly excel spreadsheet formulas for an aerodynamics design competition.
Both my parents are also electrical engineers, and like them, I managed to convince the U.S. Air Force to bankroll my college undergraduate degree–and my master’s degree as well, later on–in exchange for my soul and the entirety of my twenties.. Maybe thirties too, we’ll see.
College, at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, is where I started getting comfortable with a lot of different languages, like C, Python, and more Java. I also learned things like Matlab and Verilog too.
Since I was an electrical engineer and not a computer science major, most of my coding projects were short and were means to an end for other stuff, like programming a microcontroller or writing short scripts to parse data.
After that I went immediately to the Air Force Institute of Technology to get my Master’s in Electrical Engineering, focusing on microelectronics and cleanroom fabrication. Most coding I did was for Matlab plots or for automating CAD file generation.
When I moved on to start working in the Air Force, I took the “programming is a means to an end” mentality from college with me as I worked on interesting projects, and learned to make use of whatever programming tools were available to me. My first assignment was a great first experience because all our main analysis work had to be done on linux machines. I got used to navigating UNIX environments, and my primary tools of the trade ended up being bash, sed/awk, and perl, with some actual git version control for the first time. More Matlab too! Around this time I also started more consciously documenting my programming projects at home, in many cases creating blog posts to record everything that I did. This has helped me immensely to remember what I had previously done, every time I dust off an old project.
I had a great time in my second assignment doing electronic warfare work. On the surface, my job didn’t explicitly require anything related to software, but I realized early on that having python or matlab would be really useful for our analysis work. After about a year of delays and paperwork, I was able to get some good software tools installed on me and my coworker’s computers. This is when I first started realizing how much the Air Force’s IT policies did to actively discourage home-grown software developers… a pretty sad state for the Air Force.
This assignment was also when I started development work on the “Bullet Shaping and Iteration Tool,” a front-end web application intended to help with writing Air Force performance reports and awards write-ups. It started off as a crazy idea from the two lieutenants I worked with, and after a few months of iteration and testing, we had a functional product. Later I publicized the tool on reddit, and now tons of people in the Air Force are using it, several thousands every week!
My third and current assignment is at the sustainment office for Air Force network. I almost feel like I’ve become part of the “adversary” I’ve been facing all these years: Air Force IT. It’s been an interesting experience, though, because I joined right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and several high profile security breaches, like solarwinds, happened while I’ve been here. Those occurrences have helped trigger several pushes towards IT modernization, from DevSecOps on the network to implimenting a “Zero Trust” network architecture… It look forward to see where all of this goes.
I made this website in the mid-2000s when I was in high school. I started by registering the xoid.us domain on Yahoo Domains and started hosting stuff on there. As a high schooler, I didn’t have a credit card at the time, so I had to surreptitiously purchase prepaid visa cards from Safeway and use those to fund the domain and hosting costs. My dad eventually found out about my prepaid visa card maneuvers (through a carelessly discarded Safeway receipt), and was mad at me for 1) doing sketchy money funneling and 2) getting ripped off by Yahoo domains. He offered to move the site onto his domain and hosting provider, and I reluctantly/gratefully agreed.
For the actual website contents, I first stole some guy’s cool digital artwork of a beach, screen-capped it, and threw that as my background. I then spent an excessive amount of time coding the entire menu bar in (what I thought was) efficient javascript. In addition, with all the php installers of cPanel (from my dad’s hosting) at my disposal, I also added a bunch of flash games and attempted to start a forum. This was my first and only blatant get-rich-off-adsense scheme, one that ultimately failed because nobody ever visited my website.
In retrospect, the high school years were very formative for me. With no idea how to do anything web related, I floundered around A LOT on google, and in doing so, I slowly but surely honed my google search skills. After hundreds of google searches all
pointing me to the same place, I realized w3schools was pretty useful, and started going straight there for most things… and I learned the value of documentation. And for debugging.. I didn’t really have any good tools for it, but I had good old trusty alert() on my side and learned about strategic breakpoint placement that way.
During the last few years of college, I decided to retire my old website and try to transform it into something more professional using GitHub pages and Jekyll. I got it started but never really finished it up (I’m trying to clean it up now, six years later).