The Journey Begins ( And it's not the Navy ).

My name is David, and I've set out on an adventure to rebuild my life from the ground up.  For my particular situation, that means finding a stable career in an industry that I believe has room for growth.  Web development is my chosen path!

When I was nine years old I started tinkering with our family computer and learned about Bulletin Board Systems.  I learned how to download my first games and use pkunzip, as well as make my first social connections via computer.  It wasn't very long after those days that I found myself in a darker side of the internet, Internet Relay Chat, EFNET.  It was there that my love for technology blossomed.  Many late nights were spent trying to keep up conversation with whom I still truly believe to be the best programmers in the world in underground hacking groups like TNT, Chrome, Cult of the Dead Cow, etc.  I never had a lack of desire to become a great developer myself, only a lack of resources.  Being a child without an income, I was only able to stumble onto programming books that I could find at my library.  Often times those books were extremely outdated and very hard to learn from as a beginner who wanted to be great.

As time went on, my love for programming faded into the background of real life.  I learned that to eat you needed an income, and that dream jobs didn't come along without extremely hard work.  After a few short jobs doing tech support for Bellsouth and other such jobs, I ended up falling into the heavy civil construction industry.  After learning how to work hard I met an engineer on the job who took me under his wings and taught me how to use advanced equipment like total stations and data collectors to survey the job site's structures and underground utilities.  I moved from a laborer to field engineer within a few years and earned a comfortable living towards the end.  Fortunately, I never forgot about my real passion and I spent a great deal of time keeping up with current web development trends and hiring people to build out startup ideas I had.  Some of the projects I built were extremely successful which inspired me to leave construction, forever, and pursue my dream once and for all.  

I hope the journey through Launch Academy and beyond will award me with the ability to look back at my past struggles and shrug them off, as if the troubles were only a stepping stone to my new life.