When I was 6 or 7 years old, my Grandparents bought me the most awesome gift ever… a NES. This set me down a path that would ultimately lead me to where I am now. A web developer.

After the NES came the 286, then the Playstation 1. At some point between Commander Keen and Ridge Racer, I decided I wanted to design my own games. I didn’t to much programming though. Around the age of 10 I started writing .bat scripts… which never did anything useful. I hacked (mostly unsuccessfully) on ZZT.

When I was 13 I created an awesome Star Trek fan site on GeoCities giving me my first taste of HTML. Taking that to what I thought was the next step, I learned VRML… which turned out to be a step towards nowhere.

No, I didn’t do any real programming until college. Here I learned C, Java, ML, Prolog, Lisp, and Icon. Along with learning what real programming was, I learned that programming games is hard. I came to the realization sometime around my senior year that being a game developer would be awesome, but probably wasn’t in the cards for me. A dream job that I might have someday.

Towards the end of my college career, I started doing web development as a research assistant using JSPs and Servlets. This turned into somewhat of an expertise for me, and ended up landing me my first job out of college.

Still using Java at the time, I was introduced to Ruby and Rails by an outside consultant. This consultant was brought in to explore the possibility of using Rails on a new project. But like so many other companies at the time, using Rails (which at the time was new and unproven in the eyes of enterprise businesses) was too high of a risk. They went with the tried and true Java approach.

I didn’t take the Java approach. I left the company shortly after and joined a startup where I got paid to do Rails full time. I had drank the Rails kool aid. I was mainly hooked on how quickly you could implement ideas. I could come up with an idea in the morning, and have a working web app by the afternoon. I could gather requirements and show off working code the same day. I loved it.

At some point, I looked back and realized that game development wasn’t for me. Rapid development of games doesn’t exist the same way it does in web development. I’ve been a happy web developer ever since.