Spent 8 years as a Computer (Hardware) Engineer. After playing with the C64 assembly language, I decided to switch to software. I enjoyed learning - so after taking Pascal, Cobol, LISP, Fortran, Assembly, Unix, C, and C++ - I finished my BS in CS... and landed a C++ Software Engineer job. Laid-off with 51 others after buy-out , and tired of DOS and a few MFC windows apps - I decided to learn the latest so back to college again. Made the President's List for 4.0 in all classes of a year-long full-time set of courses including C# and .NET (it was new at the time at v1.0 around 12/2000-2001).

While attending - I converted the MS VB.NET ASP.NET Starter web-site sample to C# (no C# examples existed at the time), and designed my own eCommerce website with added integration to 3 distributors APIs, UPS, FedEx and PayPal (wrote my own based on API specs - no plug-in/sample code). Site had support for 3 databases (Customers /Distributors /Products) hosted on any server and multiple DB types: MS Access, Oracle or SQL Server. After a while, it served it's purpose (after learning no way to compete with volume pricing of big sites) and I landed a .NET Developer position and have been coding since...