Re: What do you do for living?

[liverpole]

BA in math.  I was always fascinated by mathematics, even as a kid.  There was never any doubt that I would pursue something math-related as an adult.

When I was in junior high school, computers were just starting to become available for the general public, and I began learning BASIC programming.  I got even more involved in computers in college, where we had a DEC RSTS/E system, and a few, very highly-in-demand video terminals.  In my junior year I learned Pascal, having mostly used BASIC and FORTRAN to that point, and was amazed at the beauty of structured programming.

In my career, I've always been a software engineer (except for the first year out of college, when I tried teaching English in Japan).  My first job gave me a chance to learn C, as well as the joys of programming in Unix.  I've found that I naturally gravitate towards higher-level languages, preferring applications programming over disciplines closer to the hardware.  In that respect, Perl fits most naturally with my style of programming, and although I knew of Perl, I didn't really start learning/using it until the summer of 2000, when I was a toolsmith for a networking company.

My current job is by far the best I've had in years.  I'm a build/release engineer for a telephony company, whose product is based on a Linux platform.  Most of my work involves writing Perl -- as I also work on tools, automation, and web-based programming (mySQL, CGI, HTML, Javascript, etc.)  I'm very blessed to be able to use my past experience combined with learning lots of new things all the time.  One thing I can say for sure is that I'll be using Perl for as long as I can!

[negation]

Kinda neat. I also work as a build engineer and with phones. Some of my work involves Perl, mostly used for automation, rest of my work revolves around special tools and solving problems as they arise.

Before that I worked with financial software, but 5 years of shares and bonds and stuff was enough for me. Programming there was really fun, but problem domain wasn't so much :)

I have bachelor's degree in engineering, topped with some odd courses here and there.