Learned C, Algebra and Calculus at 14 for what it's worth. I wrote a general purpose game GUI system, scrollbars, font system, picture in picture, keyboard and mouse handlers, etc. thousands of hours over the summer break between junior high and highschool. On my own, I mean little brown kid, whose mother dropped out of highschool and didn't know any one else involved in computer stuff, or access to people with math backgrounds own. I wasn't just writing hello world and simple console apps.

I know there are thousands of other developers on here with similar background, many who are much better than I am but I started off good. I took AP C/C++ freshman year of high school and was in the top of my class etc. Although I quit programming for a few years after getting refused entry into the specific program I wanted to attend in the college program my sophmore year of high school, and after the shift from dos to Win95, GameSDK which I just didn't enjoy working with as much.

I never got into the 31337 coding or algorithms side heavily, although I've been meaning to now that I'm down to a nice 40 hours a month work schedule. My focus has mostly been performance tuning high volume web sites, system/software architecture, and internal systems and tools. I'm a strong autodidact so I constantly go out of my way to learn new things and usually go out of my way to do things the hard way (e.g. investigate the best possible solution on a given platform/framework for a given problem instead of just going with the tech debt laden good enough solution based on what I already know), but I've been tied-up picking up IOT development, and Elixir/Phoenix for the last few years instead of electron or whatever is hip these days.

I'm currently the primary developer and architect on a multi million dollar IOT stack that includes a GAE Java with Objectify client api layer, Elixir/Phoenix + Mnesia, Riak and formerly Redis backend, and an Angular4/Bootstrap4 TypeScript admin page. I've had to help debug issues in the Objective C iphone client, and wrote some of the initial framework code and library wrappers for it to interface with some of the Elixir Libraries and to add a layer of indirection around the generated GAE apis. I maintain some node.js admin tools although I've migrated most of that over to elixir. I also have applied some patches to a weather forecast proxy service maintained by another developer in GO to enable better handling of null values and some other odds and ends and read through documentation and plenty of articles on here and elsewhere discussing the high level pros and cons of the language versus elixir to get a feel for it, and it's use cases although I don't know it well enough to list having only spent a few hours here and there with it. I could work in the language today if I had to but I don't know all of its quirks yet.

In addition to the above recent java/elixir and some node experience, I had to go in last minute and spend a good chunk of time rewriting my clients product line's 2017 firmware after the chinese hardware team failed to get the product to reliably function. Prior to that I had to help troubleshoot SSL connectivity and resolve a SSL cipher issue after another hardware team with much more experience than me in the area had failed to do so. These were my first real exposures to doing embedded system work, discounting designing and writing an x-mode GUI on the 386 when I was kid, and I objectively did incredibly well based on outcomes.

In addition to maintaining these Java, Elixir, Typescript (mostly pushed off on the junior dev as of the last year) Admin Page, and C Firmware projects I maintain a php rpg game which, because I wanted to dig into it I setup to run on a docker cluster a few years ago. Senginx with dynamic ip resolution (because it cost extra on vanilla nginx) routing to phpfpm, elixir and static containers, mysql on containers, postgres, jira/atlassian containers, with consul.io DNS for hooking things together with out loosing connectivity after rebooting. Here I don't mean I checked out some existing containers, I went in and figure out how to do a lot of things (should probably include that somewhere in my resume), so I could help give others advice on the stuff.

In the previous five years I've additionally helped trouble shoot some C# issues for JetzyApp although i'm starting to get a bit rusty. At Great nonprofits I helped push the change to bootstrap 3 and responsive design, updated parts of the code and API to run on laravel (because it looked more interesting than previous php frameworks I'd used and had good enough performance characteristics), improved the work flow by setting up production like vagrant developer sandboxes, and circle ci continuous deployment, etc.

At microsoft I took a crude poorly working batch processing script responsible for converting test data from one system and converted it into a reliable system service. I didn't need to make it a system service, It just seemed like the most reliable approach to get to the point it was supposed to be at, and I'd never written one so I wanted to dig into it.

I continuously go out of my way to learn new things, but I think I've been making the mistake of learning the things I find most interesting instead of what the market most values lately.