Examples:
* I've travelled to all 7 continents
* I've won an olympic gold medal
* I've built a start-up from scratch and sold to Google
* I invented a consumer electronic device that has sold 10M units
* I've produced a feature length motion picture [Insert Title]
* I had this ... funny life experience
* I went drinking with Vladimir Putin* I started at university when I was 13.
* I won the Putnam Competition.
* I hold a world record for computing Pi.
* My bsdiff binary patching tool is used on tens of millions of computers and has saved several hundred human-years of waiting for software updates to download.
* I found a security bug in an Intel CPU. (Osvik/Shamir/Tromer also found it, but I was first, by a few weeks.)
* I'm the Concertmaster of an amateur symphony orchestra which is performing the Verdi Requiem tomorrow.
Ok, back to centering that bloody div.
div.centered {
width: *x*;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}You can't just say "I don't sell to Canadians" and therefore avoid GST and the CRA.
The last thing he should be looking for is an expensive audit.
You need to speak with an accountant - if CRA decides to audit you (as they would seeing that you are declaring income with no GST remittance) you could be in a world of hurt.
See here: http://blog.9thsphere.com/blog/are-you-billing-gst-correctly...
Oh, and your list makes me feel unworthy. :-)
* Wrote an indexing program in C that crashed a Netware network. :P
* I've read the Bhagwad Gita, the Koran, the Bible and the Tao Teh Ching. I am still an atheist.
* I've written a complete IM module at work when drunk. Oddly, this has been considered one of my better contributions to the project in that company.
* I've completed reading five Asimov novels in the course of a single day.
* I am an Indian, yet can't speak any Hindi. I have lived in the Gulf, yet can't speak any Arabic. My folks speak Konkani at home, yet I cannot speak that either. Dad knows Portuguese, yet I somehow never picked it up from him. Strangely though, I can speak French, Japanese, Quenyan and am on my way to studying Sanskrit.
Perhaps that's why you're an atheist ;)
Tao te ching is not a religious book.
"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao"
That is a paraphrase from memory of the opening of the book. Which seems to me a lot like the Jewish refusal to speak the formal name for God because it is too holy and they couldn't speak it truthfully.
(OK, technically speaking ~45C, not boiling.)
Anyhow, my friends had been badgering me for a while while in the indoor portion of the hot springs to transition to the outdoor portion with them. I told them I would come out in a few minutes. This particular hot springs, being mostly natural, has an uneven gradient -- it has a transition from 1.5 feet deep to six feet deep which is about as abrupt as falling off a cliff. The transition is marked with a log suspended above the water and a warning sign outside the door.
Anyhow, while I was still gathering up my courage to go outside, a little boy splashing along in the two-foot end of the spring approached the gap in the pole that permits access to the deep end and, before anyone could warn him away, vanished.
I only have two coherent memories of what happened next: one, I remember thinking most strongly that I was disregarding the advice in the Boy Scout Manual by entering water to remove a drowning victim and, two, as soon as we broke the surface he spit boiling water in my eye. This made me happy because it meant I didn't have to attempt rescue breathing.
What made me substantially less happy was going from being the gangly white guy in the corner everyone was making a pretense of not staring at to being the gangly white guy in the center of the room who everyone was making absolutely no pretense of not staring at. I handed the child to his father (didn't say anything -- my Japanese totally failed me out of embarassment) and bolted to the corner. Then folks heard the commotion from the lady's side of the springs and came over to see what was happening. I bolted out, got changed, and searched the vicinity for icecream while waiting for my friends to finish their baths.
* I survived and kept a roof over 3 kids and a wife while only making 10'000 one year. (in USA) --- Did the same with 4-5 kids while technically homeless and out of work.
* I'm raising 5 amazing children with an incredible wife
* I've taught myself C, Java, Perl, PHP, ASP, Erlang, Lisp, HTML, CSS, Javascript
* I'm a born again christian (Actually the thing I'm most proud of although I know not impressive to some, But it is a brag thread so I'm including it.)
At the time I write this comment, most other comments are about "me".
Noteable exceptions:
- jgrahamc obtaining a government apology for the mistreatment of Alan Turing
- AN447 paying off his parent's mortgage
- patio11 saving a life
Great job, guys! You inspire me. (Apologies if I missed anyone.)
As for me, I've done lots of cool stuff, but if I had to pick one thing to put on my tombstone, it would be, "He made his mother laugh when nothing else would." Everything else seems to pale in comparison.
I don't want my contribution to this interesting discussion to be read as "me me me", so I've removed it.
Sure, telling stories about what you've done for others is great but that shouldn't preclude telling your others accomplishments. I can't understand why someone would take these comments as "me me me" when they were solicited and there's clearly a very interested audience.
* Performed with New York City Ballet
* Sang with Placido Domingo
* Founding investor in Napster
* Credited as a pioneer in social networking, founding pioneering one in 2001, which heavily influenced Friendster which led to myspace, facebook etc.
* Acted in Sundance Feature Film competition selection
* Now doing next big thing, hehe ;)
A particular fellow was famous for his modesty. One day he started signing all of his correspondence "He who is modest." This irked one of his detractors, who wrote back to ask, "How you be modest if you sign your correspondence so flamboyantly?" The result came back swiftly: "I no longer think of my modesty as a virtue."
See also
* I graduated high school as STAR student and a national merit scholarship winner -- while missing 18 or 19 days of school every year and dragging myself to school sick much of the rest of the time and also being called "lazy" and told I "wasn't really sick". (I wasn't diagnosed with CF until I was almost 36.)
* I was also inducted into Mu Alpha Theta in 11th grade (the earliest you can be) and was state alternate for the Governor's Honors program in the subject of Journalism.
* I have a 22 year old son with cystic fibrosis who has not been on antibiotics in 12 years and has needed no medication at all in 3 years or so.
* My sons and I live without a car and walking is our primary mode of transit, in spite of two of us having CF which means we are supposed to be deathly ill.
* My divorce was amicable in spite of my family background. (In contrast, when my two siblings got divorced, their spouses made attempts on their lives.)
* As of last summer, I am drug free, having gotten off about 8 or 9 prescription drugs and then gotten off the OTC drugs that replaced them.
* I genuinely like men, as friends and lovers, in spite of having the kind of childhood that tends to produce women with multiple personality disorder.
* I am the one who decided to get divorced, not my husband, even though I was deathly ill at the time and had been a homemaker almost my entire adult life.
* Now that I am basically well for the first time in my life, I think my best years are ahead of me, not behind me. I'm 44. :-)
Congratulations, it looks like you've had a tough deck to play with and you're making the most of it.
Yes, but it's also a little like the joke about the sheik with many wives, 'each more beautiful than the last': Only if you line them up that way.
Congratulations
Thank you!
it looks like you've had a tough deck to play with and you're making the most of it.
I had a head start: I learned to play poker and deal cards when I was about 4 years old. Daddy was a cardsharp. Couldn't have a relationship to him if you didn't play. :-P
* I've successfully started a bar in Ibiza from scratch
* I learnt PHP, javascript, SQL, CSS and HTML from scratch without any help
* I hold three patents
* I've done three startups
* I survived an English boarding school
* I bought a boat that I live on, which I've totally refurbished and redone without ever having had a screwdriver in my hand before.
* I have been asked to star in a pornmovie, but declined
* I've had a short but glorious career as a male stripper
*I had fun doing all of it
:-)
* I learnt PHP, javascript, SQL, CSS and HTML from scratch without any help
I wouldn't believe you didn't read anything at all about the languages because you can't just guess stuff like that :), but did you pick up a book and learn? did you read the documentation? If so, isn't that some kind of help?
Basically, does "taught myself" mean "not going to a formal class"/"not having anyone teaching me in person"?
Essentially, yes. Although, I've seen people who "learned" how to program from taking programming classes, and I'm starting to believe that, ultimately, the only way to learn to program is to learn it of your own volition, outside the context of an official class.
I've seen code from grad students in computer engineering (!) which was buggy, uncommented, poorly formatted, unindented, untested, poorly designed, and sometimes meaningless. Meanwhile, people who went out and learned how to program instead of having the knowledge taught at them manage to produce much better code, consistently.
Basically my approach was to find a project I wanted to do, then simply do it, and ask Google as I went along. There were a few problems along the way, primarily in the beginning where I didn't have a clue as to why things didn't work and didn't have sufficient knowledge to know the right search phrases. It took me a long time to find out that your indexpage has to be called index.html for instance.
Later I found out that the project I was doing was actually much more complicated than first anticipated (it involved the entity-attribute-value model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model and was rather ajax heavy) and I had some problems finding out how to tweak code, use objects properly, etc. It was a great learning experience though - and maybe a good product will come out of it.
FYI Rutger Hauer actually wrote that last line in to the script. Most memorable scene in the movie if you ask me.
I always aim to come at work at 10, yet always, I end up coming at 10.20-10.25.
I am always punctual and late at the same time. The Mediterranean clock on me still running even in the west coast.
- I won an IBM thinkpad from IBM.
- I wrote a program that could sing.
- I was slapped by a girl at the streets of Kolkata for wishing her good night. I was drunk.
- I am doing what I love.
Eh? Why?
* I built the consumer site for BTopenworld almost single-handedly in 6 weeks (CMS and portal from scratch in TCL), it was live for 7 years before being replaced
* Recently enjoyed a 97.5% mark on an MSc assignment
* Survived living on the streets for more than 2 winters (when you live on the street, you count winters and not years)
* Every code I've ever written outside of education has gone live somewhere... I first learned to code by making a stock control system for a small company and knew computers should be good at that stuff
* I taught myself TCL, PERL, Java, C#, C++, JavaScript, and am currently enjoying a foray into Clojure.
* I've met Paul McCartney, hung out with Blur, Elastica, Pulp and Oasis... partied several years of my life away in a blur
* I've created a data warehouse for semi-structured data from ECM systems
This list is not necessarily in chronological order. I absolutely am missing stuff but the bullets above fill me with joy of some kind. I haven't done the thing I want most to do, which is to work with some great minds on some complex problems, but this is why I'm doing an MSc so late, I want to knock on Google's door.
Whilst on the streets I hitch-hiked around, and as I did so I discovered that you slept during the day and kept your wits about you at night. It's too cold some nights to sleep out, so then you move. Or crawl into a building site where others wouldn't go and you'd be safe and mostly sheltered.
I eventually found that not being on the street at night was better than being on the street, since I was young I went to bars that had gigs. You could get in early before the gig started, so entrance was free. And then stay post-gig as a club would run until 3am at least. Some nights you'd meet students who would take an interest in the story and let you crash at theirs. Which is a free toast top-up and shower opportunity. I developed confidence from having to find these opportunities.
With the gigs settling in I would meet bands, and then they'd know me and give me free food from their riders. Eventually I knew a lot of the bands and I offered to run their T-Shirt stalls. This earned me money too.
Knowing the bands gave me exposure to them, so I wrote fanzines and sold those. You'd sell more fanzines if the band who were playing were on the cover... so I'd make only the insides, and produce covers according to who was playing.
Elastica took a shine to me so I followed them around, helped design their merchandise, run their paper mailing lists and sold T-Shirts. This led to the stock management thing, they purchased me an IBM computer which I put in the squat I then was living in. I built a program to manage their stock, then their mailing list, then tax reports of merchandise sold, etc.
Finally I ran into another band who I liked, and I offered all of the services I now knew how to do. The sales of merchandise, running of fan club, etc. They said yes, and I did that stuff and also acquired a modem (it was 1996 now). I taught myself HTML and PERL and made a website too.
Within 2 years I'd gone from the streets to employment in the music industry where programming was a core part of my job alongside selling merchandise. Later I worked directly for the label and by this time was off the streets properly with a flat-share with a girl I'd met in the music industry.
It makes a great tale, but not all of it was easy. Hunger was frequent, illness almost as frequent, cold nights scar your memory. I slept in some bad places at times, and other times managed to blag my way into some swanky places. It was ups and downs, but all of it was better than returning to the place where I had grown up. And the driving force in my life is to ensure that I never return to the place I came from, and to never go back to the streets. It's a hell of a motivator.
* I obtained a government apology for the mistreatment of Alan Turing
* I wrote an original book
* I went to Oxford after my state school told me I wasn't up to it, I stayed and did a doctorate there
* I learnt to swim when I was 21
* I learnt to speak French fluently as an adult
I always loved people that told me I wouldn't be able to do something. I remember a 4th grade teacher that told me I couldn't write (presumably because we were to make a copy-n-paste book entitled "quaken' shakin' earth" about earthquakes, and I spelled the title wrong. I still don't know how to spell it, in fact.)
Fast-forward 10 or so years, and now people give me money to write. I guess it's a long time to hold a grudge, but I still think it's funny that elementary school teachers feel the need to tell their students that they'll "never" do well. (I also had other teachers that thought I should be in special ed, presumably because I got a pencil stuck in my hair once. This still happens to me on a regular basis, in fact, but it turns out that that doesn't have much to do with actual abilities.)
I was working as a systems administrator at a Big 3 automotive supplier and identified a gap in our million dollar production system. If we ever lost connectivity, the system would be useless and the off-line backup system was insufficient. Our contract stated that we could be charged $10,000 per minute for shutting down the plant. I wanted to learn how to program, so I wrote a backup app in perl.
The electric company dug up our data lines and we lost communications for 18 hours. We tried using the backup system, but it could not keep up with production and we put the plant in jeopardy. My app, which was not in my job description to create and not supported by the company, ran production for 17 hours without errors in a complex automotive sequencing environment.
I don't know that the Big 3 automotive company would have actually charged us $10 million dollars, but it would have easily been > 1 million.
Raising 3 kids as a single father, among other personal accomplishments, by far trumps this achievement, but it doesn't sound as impressive on paper.
* almost got booted from college for publishing the president's dirty laundry on Paul Schrader's dime
* had 3 top 40 songs with my band on the radio (alt top 40)
* founded a pr agency at 26
* had my own newspaper column before 30
* got a client 25 minutes on cnn int (valued at 6 million us)
* was the first to publicly attack the junta after the coup in thailand in 2006
* was interviewed on live tv for an hour without a script (hellish)
* taught myself a handful of computer languages and secured early funding for an internet startup
* got to brag about it all on hn =)
A friend of mine won the Nobel peace prize and then lost it in a bar afterwards. I wish I could say that.
They went out celebrating afterwards (edit: not the King!) and he lost his memento. I like to imagine him calling the bar the next day and asking if any Nobel prizes had been handed in.
"Did you find it? Great. What? Chemistry - no, sorry, that's not it. Peace."
I worked as a treelopper for a while, and was cutting down the waste in the trailer. I was moving my feet around on the stack with the saw idling at arms'length. The Stihl 076 was idling too fast and caught on something, lurched forwards, cut through the steel trailer and bounced into my forehead, all in an instant.
Lots of blood, 15 stitches, but it turns out skulls are hard enough. Now I have a faint Harry Potter-style scar.
I've done some actual cool stuff too, not just surviving an accident, but I think the thing I am most proud of is self-diagnosing myself with depression later in life and learning to manage it. I wish I had worked it out earlier, but at least I'm still around and self-aware.
* Everyday I read 300 pages (book & articles) of writings, and scan (eye scanning) 300-400 articles online. Pro day.
* Now I study my second university. First was 6 years medicine, second is also medicine, I am in 4th semester and I am 23 now.
* I went 5 years to piano school.
* I went 2 years to painting school.
* While I study medicine, I learned graphic design and it's already 5 years that I work as a graphic designer in a very big design firm.
* While studying medicine I've learned myself - Marketing
* I was born in USSR and now I found myself in Germany.
* In 2003 I became a muslim.
* After 3 month I am planning to start a startup.
I saw that HN people are so SMART! so great brains in one place. wow.
Which languages do you know? (When I was a kid, I wanted to learn 6 languages but it didn't work out. It bothers me less now that I know a little CSS, HTML and XHTML.)
-German
-English
-Turkish
-Russian
-Azerbaijani
-Arabish (lower intermediate)
-Ottomanish (not so good at speaking)
It sounds like that's taking a significant productivity hit on you, which is not worth it.
I think you misunderstood my point by assuming it as a decision. Im from india and those things dont cost cheap in here specially when i wasn't earning anything had only debt to pay to.
(P.S. I wish I could delete my thread now, wasn't worth it. Completely stupid!)
Regardless, my musical career never took me that far.
You're right, about 80 million bands played there, so in one sense it's not such an amazing feat.
OTOH, it's just fucking cool. :)
I played there a few times; not sure how many bands got asked back. Getting that first gig was easy. Walked into the club, ran into Hilly Kristal, said I had a band. "Can you bring in 300 people?", "Oh, sure", I lied.
I found out we were playing when I was looking through the Village Voice to see what bands were around and saw Chinese Forehead[0] listed for the next week. :) Apparently some big name act canceled and they tossed together some showcase thing, and neglected to actually tell us. Pre-cell phone days, I guess.
It was a rush, and it was real accomplishment for me. It also cemented my desire to not be a spectator, of trying to get off my ass and get on stage, whatever that stage may happen to be.
It's not the same as becoming a dot-com millionaire or climbing K2, but all the same it I'm quite proud of having written and performed my songs at a world-famous dive. :)
So, for people looking at the list of amazing accomplishments listed in this thread, do not be discouraged.
Pick a goal; work until you reach it; repeat.
[0] For the curious: http://www.jamesbritt.com/chinese-forehead/
* Built an application hosting & management firm with 4 employees and $1m+/year of gross-revenue, sold my half of it earlier this year
* Worked as the only production sysadmin at Napster before the $100m investment, left shortly afterwards.
* Once bought Joey Ramone a beer at CBGBs and spent an evening talking with him, a year or so before he died.
I was just in one a few nights ago over in Oakland that a friend is living in now. We did some exploring and found an old boiler-room, remnant of an old structure that the warehouse was built over. You'd never find something that fun in some yuppy live/work loft. http://twitter.com/mhalligan/status/10614020589 has a photo of their main living space.
After a few days of sea sickness, hard work, lack of sleep, and fear I probably would have shot myself if someone had given me a loaded pistol.
Nothing I did since then (and I had summer jobs while I was a student doing things like weeding large fields of barley, digging ditches etc.) was anything like that.
So I learned to have a LOT of respect for people who don't have the chance to make lots of money sitting at a computer for most of the day.
Quite proud that the paper I presented in Chicago in '94 suggested that it might be a good to build programmatic extensibility into web browsers - possibly using a virtual machine. I remember the audience thinking it was a very silly idea... ;-)
Given the precedent of the Eolas case I wonder how much my employer might have made if that idea had been patented. Fortunately they didn't approve of me doing that work so that never happened.
* I've seen the olympics on TV
* I've built a start-up from scratch and it's indexed by Google
* I use consumer eletronic devices used by over 10m
* I've watched feature length motion pictures [Many Titles]
* I've had a lot of funny life experiences
* I've seen pictures of Vladimir Putin
187 Comments in 9 hours
haha I guess everyone's favourite subject ultimately is themselves
As for myself, I have zero debt, no outstanding loans at all, including no car payment and no mortgage.
* Work full time as a software engineer with a 6 figure income without having gone to college.
* Organizing the Seattle Alt.NET Conference for 2010 (looking to be around a 100 person conference this year)
* Was accepted into a class for gifted students in elementary school.
* Had a highschool reading level in 1st grade.
* I've never known how it feels to not be able to learn something.
* I've traveled to 6 out of 7 continents
* I've managed to stretch undergrad out into a seven year fiasco
* Co-starred in the film Air Hockey (2005), which was played at the opening ceremony of 2006 Air Hockey World Tournament hosted in Las Vegas (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2390531/).
* Faculty upper year scholarship for University of Waterloo Computer Engineering '04 (for ranking 1st).
* Finished 1st place in Sir Isaac Newton National Physics Competition '03.
* Finished 1st place in American Computer Science League Competition '02.
* Finished 1st place in Pascal National Mathematics Competition '00.
* Broke the record for the fastest goal scored (3.57 s) in a group qualifier for the U17 World Cup while playing for the Chinese national soccer team '99.
He has done quite a bit of stage work and he sings as well. Apart from being a really smart and talented guy he can work harder than anybody I know.
* My parents are from South Africa, emigrated to Canada during Apartheid, and my relatives were good friends of Nelson Mandela's and played relatively important roles in the Anti-Apartheid movement. While imprisoned on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela wrote a letter (or two) to my Great Aunt. There's a copy in a biography I read. I believe he also went to at least one of her birthday parties. Later, when he was in Toronto (1998) I got to meet him, and sing ABC' and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with him (I was 7 @ the time)
* My great uncle used to work with Mahatma Ghandi, when they were both lawyers in India. There are pictures somewhere in India's archives of them together.
* Last week while in the grocery store with my dad, a woman near us yelled that the guy running stole her purse. Myself and another guy immediately ran after him (another guy joined us on the way) and we chased the culprit into the parking lot. He gave up and I sternly asked for the purse back, then I handed it to the lady and a bunch of people called the police. (I didn't want to brag about that one, but now seemed like a good opportunity)
- Converted a car to electric drive when I was 20
- Was a contestant on a reality show pilot that aired on Discovery
- Built a motorized rotisserie out of two old bicycles to cook ~100lb of lamb for my friend's wedding
- Built a weight-controlled electric longboard (3wdm.blogspot.com)
- Built my own Mazda 323 GT-R (not sold in the US) out of imported parts and a US-spec AWD Protege
- Gutted and renovated a 1914 house, including all wiring, plumbing and heating, not to mention stripping eight layers of paint off of every last bit of the original woodwork and windows.
Although countless other people have done it before me, I most proud of the last one. A project like that completely takes over your life. I was working to the point of complete exhaustion on it during every moment that I wasn't at my day job for well over a year.
* Won the Bank of America Computer Science award in high school.
* Have only worked in my field of study and interest (comp sci)
* Had a $20/hour job at age 18, which was my second job. First being one at $15/hour.
* Two years later I asked for a 50% raise, got declined, quit, they came after me and they have been my client to this day.
* I survived a horrible rip tide/current after accepting death without the help of a lifeguard.
* Wrote the most efficient language generator based on a given grammar in discrete math class.
* Taught myself enough about programming/servers/etc before college, that by the time college was over, it had taught me nothing new.
* Know how to speak 2 languages fluently without an accent in either language.
Haven't seen a winter since 2006. I chase the sunshine around the world by doing mini-migrations to avoid the cold.
I learn a little bit of the local tongue everywhere I go. Can say 'Thank you' in around 30 languages.
I met up with my step-dad after 25 years of separation. An amazing guy and someone I definitely want to get to know better.
My other great achievements are a work in progress though...
EDIT: added a missed item
We had no idea they were showing it and I was just watching the keynote and was blown away. So in short I was lead developer of the first game shown on the iPad publicly.
"A truly rich man is someone whose children runs into their arms even when they're empty"
"My daughter one time said... We were leaving church, like a church party. We were driving home, in the car. And she didn't want to go home. She was like 3 or 4 at the time. I don't want to go to Mommy's house. I don't want go to Mia's house.
OK, we'll go to Daddy's house. OK.
We pulled into our house and she started freaking out crying. Why? She thought my house was the office.
And that's when I realized I needed to start pulling back.
To step it up, be a baller at home"
- Josh James, founder of Omniture
From video originally posted by adammichaelc (I highly recommend the entire 1-hr video for inspiration and a kick-in-the-seat-of-your-pants)
* helped my mother raise my brother and me. This past New Year, I was able to fly my brother up to live with me for a week, showing him what you can accomplish with hard work and dedication.
* wrote an essay that received a comment saying that the post had helped the commenter overcome something he had been struggling with through years of therapy and self-doubt.
* overturned our high school's regulation that allows only seniors to take classes at the university.
* taught myself Calc 2 in high school and got a perfect score on the AP exam; my best friend and I were the first people at my school to get above a 4 on any AP Calc exam. I didn't consider this a great accomplishment until I ran into my old HS math teacher a few years back and learned that she now tells our story to all of her Calc students to motivate them.
* started a rock band in college, played some really cool venues, did one show with a band that now gets airplay on Sirius XM, and won a few competitions.
* landed a girlfriend (of 2 years now) who is out of my league.
But I think my greatest accomplishment is that I seem to have made my parents proud.
I didn't take it anywhere, and later (after people discovered xmlhttprequest) I learned that even at the time I could have used an iframe, which would have been nicer. I assume people were doing that before I made my discovery, but I don't know for sure.
* Turned down a potential offer to Westpoint.
* Achieved the 99th percentile in Standford Achievement Test every year I took it (5 years), each in different subjects. However, I don't have the grades to support it.
* Touched the Stanley Cup.
* Learned PHP when I was 13. C, C++, Java, etc. came soon after.
* I'm a programmer by trade, but I am going to school for management.
* I've recently become friends with several of my childhood heroes.
* At one time I have worked on 4 start-ups at a time
* I have donated Rs2000(Almost $50) to a begger
* I have programming my self and taught my college professors
* had a brief career as a professional martial artist many years ago. you could also technically say that i was a professional magic: the gathering player, too.
* i technically dismembered my left arm. it got better.
* i'm not an olympian, but i know quite a few, including medal winners. on a related note, i train and compete on the higher levels of sport fencing, and used to do the same for other martial arts.
* i'm working a full-time job, trying to bootstrap a startup, and working on writing a book.
* my canonical bacon number is 3. non-canonical is 2.
* I traveled all around the world in the french navy (http://carnet-escale.chez-alice.fr/JDA/escales/carte.JPG)
* I left the french navy to do IT despite having a lifelong contract there
* I'm about to move to the country-side with my family and bootstrap projects (that, I'm really proud of :-)
- Win the nobel prize. (not yet)
- Write a book. (done)
- Travel the world (not totally done, but I live in South America now)
- Be Time magazine's man of the year (it's a bit of a cop-out, but done: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00....)
- Have my face on a stamp (not done, but that's easy these days)
Looking back, I was probably lacking ambition there, too focused on achievements that display what others think of me. Maybe I should make a new list.
I sing duets, dance tangos, and play concertos.
I cook banquets. I wheel, make deals, and strike bargains. I purchase fruit in large quantities. I partake and imbibe. I articulate, expound, and drive home the point. I maintain a strong moral fiber and act with integrity.
I forge trails and bushwhack through jungles. When I am not walking, I am running. I sail and drive and fly and ride and crawl.
I write encyclopaedias. I learn, study, forecast, ponder, and calculate. I know the answer.
* Built an ecommerce site that has handled over $2 million in sales.
* Went snorkeling with a couple of American actors in Australia during my honeymoon.
* Ran the website for a non-profit film festival for the past 6 years bringing movies to a town that is about as far from Hollywood as you can get.
* Currently working on two startups ... one funded, and one of my own.
* Dropped out of school the same age (8th grade)
* Wrote another book on Flash when I was 18
* Worked as a remote consultant from ages 15 to 18
* Still working as a remote consultant for startups (I'm now 24)
I had a great start but I think enjoying success (and money) too early in life can be extremely distracting. I stopped achieving when I started making over 50kUSD a year. Also got into a lot of debt. Not too clever after all.
Best thing I did, tho, was quitting Flash and getting into server-side development. Learned Python and then Ruby, now back to Python (but still doing lots of Ruby).
I think the biggest lesson I learned is that no matter what you do, make sure you use at least SOME of your time doing something for yourself. Start getting businesses out the door as soon as you can and don't stop until you're successful with one of them. All you need is to get yourself to start -- understand Parkinson's Law and the 80-20 rule. It gets easier over time.
I have lived 13 years within a 5-minute-walking distance from the beach. I still can't swim, but I always go deep.
I was a bartender in a private club and got to mix drinks for several individuals. I met Senators, actors, tech founders, multinational executives daily. I missed Angelina Jolie one afternoon by 10 minutes because I decided to go home 10 minutes earlier.
* Skipped college and immediately started working full-time ... for myself. Nothing beats not having a boss to answer to.
* Ranked a German company between #1-3 in Google.de for 19/20 very competitive keywords (Work I was proud of).
* Web & print design for several top musicians (Work I was proud of too).
I enjoyed reading all of you're accomplishments. Keep it up :)
* Self taught every programming language I know (Started with BASIC, then JavaScript and PHP, did some windows programming in VB, then later VB.NET and now doing asp programming in C#. I've also toyed with Objective-C/C/C++) I'm really impressed by some of the comments here. I've had a better understanding of these languages than most of my professors (which probably speaks more to the quality of my school than my programming ability)
* I was the youngest competitor at a car rally event here in Australia, competing against the likes of Sir Jack Brabham. (side note, we managed to get the porsche off the clock at nearly 300 km/hr)
* I designed a forced induction cooling system (originally for the same Porsche - the waste heat was then distributed to the fuel rail as a warmer), which then subsequently sold the idea to a racing team here in Australia. I'm pretty sure they shelved it.
* Some years ago, I accidentally set naughty bits on fire while trying to cook Ramen.
* I found unreleased Atari and Colecovision games at a flea market in 2008 on bare EPROMs.
* My writing has been used to teach at Harvard, yet I flunked out of college.
Logged over 2000 offshore sailing miles.
Learned to code when I was 7.
Sold a work of art at auction when I was 8.
Tied for 2nd place in a senior high national chess championship.
Have survived 3 near-death experiences.
As for me:
* I worked on software that was used to design a small part of one of the sexiest consumer electronics products in the world.
* I built a browser game five years ago that's stil running, with a few hundred active players.
A highlight of that experience was having Gary Gygax hang out in our booth at GenCon - http://web.archive.org/web/19980205004902/www.webrpg.com/?li...
* I've been to 5 high schools
* Went through 9th grade twice
* Dropped out of school entirely
* Self-taught everything I know about computers and technology
* Work for a large media company doing the job I set out to do for a decent wage
* Not that this is impressive, but finally began working out 5 months ago and continue to stick to it 4 days a week. This is the longest i've stuck to anything besides a job/relationship and I am in the best shape of my life.
* I am a member of Upsilon Pi Epsilon http://upe.acm.org/
* I've been to Tokyo and competed in the web service composition challenge
* I have climbed 2 out of Colorados 53 14ers so far. My goal is all 53 in CO and then the North American continent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteener
* I have surfed big waves in Costa Rica
I died at age 5/6 (am now 26)...well...technically I had a cardiac arrest and my heart stopped beating for 15 - 20 minutes.
It's reaffirming to read of these abilities and how they were NOT sidelined by mainstream or environmental pressures.
I became friends in college with a fellow who is one of the brightest people I've ever met. And a great "explainer" and story-teller, to boot. His grades suffered at times, and he nearly left once or twice, because he was so simply and totally into his own interests (some very technical) as opposed to some of what was going on in the classes.
Half his life some, particularly conventional people might call "a mess". On the other hand, he's an engineer on the CMS at CERN.
As for myself, I was considered very bright, but struggled -- mostly with conventional social settings and also with very heightened sensitivity to environmental stimuli. (E.g. I can't tune out neighboring noise; my brain doesn't filter it from my attention.). A couple of physical injuries with chronic after-effects sidelined me for a long time. (Injury I can deal with. Having no recourse against chronic symptoms is something else.)
Nonetheless, I've had my moments. Such as pretty much single handedly converting a billion dollar cost accounting system from a hard coded legacy environment to instead interface with an underfunded SAP implementation.
Pretty much ALL the inputs changed. Things were handed "over the wall" from the SAP implementation with no negotiation and very little in the way of instruction. No one taught me a thing nor provided me any tools or budget beyond my salary. The method proposed by "the other side" of the wall would not have worked at all. So, I rolled my own.
It worked. It worked when raw, detailed order records replaced summary reports the manufacturing facilities used to provide (leaving me to processed multiple hundreds of MB of essentially raw data with product identifiers floating anywhere within a free form text field supporting any number of simultaneous and varying data points). It worked when headcount was reduced from four, for a while five, people down to just me.
Not only did it work, it became much more accurate and full-proof.
I like reading here how other people simply did things that were "impossible" or certainly not expected. And that it's not a matter of somehow placing oneself into some "abnormal state of being". It's who you are, and getting done what interests you and/or needs to be done.
I still don't fit in to mainstream society. I burned out, hard-time, in my last job mostly fighting an environment of distraction and complacency. Reading other stories here provides a small boost; there are other people who "make it" being something other than conventional. And by "make it", I mean in their own eyes, as opposed to someone else's measure.
Somehow, for me its been a difficult and necessary lesson that a lot of convention is a straight-jacket for bright people, and that criticism that is leveled against them is often hypocritical and self-serving even while it is espoused as being "for their good".
P.S. Even when such criticism and suggestions are well meant, they may simply not fit. Trying too hard to please or accommodate the other person becomes self-destructive.
* drew a weekly comic strip that published online during college.
* discovered a corner detection algorithm using radon transforms.
* built operational sensor networks for the military.* Appear in the background in a movie scene with Judd Nelson (John Bender from the Breakfast Club).
* started my first 'gig' translating books/magazines, printing them in a borrowed dot-matrix printer and selling around the town (at age 9). Also wrote original pieces about videogames and stuff (sold around 100-200 copies, heh)
* got my first programming-related 'prize' at school (age 11): won a couple of books because of an RPG game I did in LOGO (self taught) for a science fair
* rooted two ISPs back in the 90's - one by going through their garbage bins and finding password info, other by cold-calling at night and convincing the security guy to hand in some info. No harm done, but it was fun fun fun
* founded and leaded a programming 'association' (PBJug, a Java User Group) - the first one in my hometown's region (now with 500 people signed up)
* got a couple of articles published as reference material on PhD and Msc thesis of people I don't even know. I'm a college dropout, btw
* had access to a lot of prototype mobile phones from two different makers. Now THAT's something to brag, for a gadget-addict
* programmed an easter egg into a very popular mobile phone - you'd see me (and the rest of the dev team) by pressing 666# while in the file browser app. They've added easter eggs on new phones after that, to keep up with the 'tradition'
fixed a bug in a finance system that saved 4mi euros from one customer. Got a "thank's from noticing" from middle management and that was about it* went from nothing (born in a small town w/ a relatively poor family) to live and work abroad, in some very respected companies (IBM, Siemens and the like), despite everyone saying I was crazy for even trying.
* went from working to high profile companies to starting up, despite everyone saying I was crazy for leaving those jobs behind
* founded 4 companies so far, all on software (different areas - one still open, just starting the 4th one)
* survived from death at least a dozen times: one from drowning at sea, one car crash, couple of very strong electric shocks, mugged (with a gun) twice, jumped into a pool with some electrical wire hanging on and almost drown/got electrocuted. Still alive and very proud of my nine-lives syndrome
* travelled 100k miles in a single year
* lost 40kg in 6 months
* drove at 200km/h in a German highway. Priceless!
* married an amazing woman and got the cutest dog on earth (named Frodo) :-)
It was nice to pay them with their own money :P
* I'm a scratch golfer
* I speak portuguese and spanish fluently
After reading some of these I feel that I haven't done much with my life :(
* I am the webdev for the alumni committee of my college (the first freshman to do so).
* A turn to man for circuitry for the robotics club.
* Beat MTech Students in debates and Treasure Hunt in a recent techfest at our college.
OK nothing glamorous in there but Just wanted to add something.