It starts when we received our first personal computer around the age of seven. It was a 386 DX 33MHz machine, and one of my dad’s friends at the school board was a well-known electrical engineer who loved to tinker, which led to him overlocking our machine to 50MHz when you hit the turbo button.

The first thing I remember asking him was, “How do I make games?”

A few milestones stick out in my mind as I progressed through elementary and high school:

  • learning programming languages like QBasic and Pascal from library books,
  • Dungeons and Dragons with my friends,
  • dial-up bulletin board systems,
  • Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) doorgame,
  • dial-up internet,
  • website development and the world of HTML,
  • Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs),
  • DSL and cable internet,
  • way too much Counter-Strike,
  • Ragnarok Online MMORPG,

A few years passed, creating many applications for many clients and working for a local website development company, and I figured to myself, “hey, I could run a company myself,” and tried it out, Exodus Media Inc, out of the Kamloops Innovation Centre.

It turns out that running a business is a lot harder than I’d imagined, and finding clients is a difficult game in itself! I was nearly bankrupt by this point, ignoring all of the red flags that started appearing. And it was then that I realized, “I need to change this before I drown,” which landed me with my current employer, who happened to be in the same shared offices.

Now, I’m working at an amazing company, Open Gaming Solutions Inc, and I’m learning a whole bunch of new technologies and processes.. and I’m trying to evolve into more than just a programmer, which is very exciting.

Much like the games that I used to play, sometimes it’s a little scary, you need to get into the groove of things with your adventuring party, and grind your way through the dungeon before you can succeed.

So let’s go adventure!