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Akoya

by Akoya (Scribe)
on May 31, 2007 at 16:26 UTC ( [id://618529]=user: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

I was introduced to computers, for the first time, my Freshman year in high school in 1979. We had a computer lab with 8 Apple IIe computers, and an introductory class that taught BASIC programming. I was hooked from that moment on. It was an interesting period in time, when computer magazines included lots of source code, COMPUSERV was the big thing, 5.25" floppies cost $1 each, and we used a hole punch to double their capacity. Adventure was my favorite game, and a major contributor to my desire to be a programmer.

After high school, and marriage, I worked as a programmer for a small computer store. I gained a lot of experience and had a lot of fun developing software for auto parts houses, a veterinary clinic, a health spa, and the Hank Williams, Jr. Fan Club. After the boss' heart attack, the business closed, and I enlisted in the Air Force.

(Un)fortunately for me, due to the timing of things, there were no open slots for programmers at the time, so I ended up a sysadmin. It turns out that I really enjoyed the work, and gained some good experiences. I got to work with Novell Netware, Banyan Vines, various Windows platforms, SunOS, Solaris and Linux. Of course, I always found the need and desire to continue programming, and wrote lots of useful tools.

It was in 1996, while I was working in Stuttgart, Germany, as a Solaris sysadmin for the Department of Defense's Global Command and Control System, that I discovered Perl. It was very easy to "fall in love" with Perl as far as languages go. It was a natural fit for the types of apps I developed, and I found myself doing more and more with Perl. By the time I left Germany, in 1999, I had developed a near real-time server monitoring and automated performance tuning system--still one of my favorite projects.

From there, I was thrown into the world of C++, where I spent the next 4 years, after that, the next 3 years were spent in C#. Even in that strange world, I found lots of uses for perl. I kept my hand in it as often and as long as possible.

After retiring from the Air Force in April of 2007, I took a contract position with UPS Supply Chain Solutions, in Alpharetta, GA. After being a contractor for a year, I have been hired on as a permanent employee. I love the company and the people, but most of all, I love the work. I get to do Perl, nearly full-time. :)

#not terribly creative, or attractive, but... print chr hex for (shift =~ /FF/, q{ 7324A361B4 4A75737420 616E 6F74 6865 7220 5065726C20 4861636B65 7221 FF63 9A4B 64A2 ... for Perl :-) } =~ /\w{2}/g)[5..29] ;

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