User since: Dec 11, 2015 at 18:02 UTC (5 years ago) Last here: Jul 30, 2020 at 15:22 UTC (4 days ago) Experience: 4432 Level: Priest (14) Writeups: 257 Location: USA User's localtime: Aug 03, 2020 at 15:59 CDT Scratchpad: View For this user: Search nodes

I wrote a Perl Poetry post once that I'm proud of. Hubris and all that, you know. :-)

My relevant life story?

I'm an Electronics Engineer by trade, and even worse, primarily an Electronics Hardware Designer (*gasp, shun the non-believer!).

At one point, I think I was around 13, I attempted to learn BASIC from a book, got bored with it, and gave up. "My thoughts were short and hair was long." Shortly after I learned how to program my trusty TI-83 calculator (so many GOTO LABELs, *shudder) to help me "cheat" on math, physics, and chemistry exams, and then eventually to program simple little video games in to play after I finished the tests early because I'd "cheated". After that I finally learned a real language with a couple semesters of C++.

It was 50/50 for me to pick an Engineering major or a Computer Science major in college. I don't have as solid a reason as I probably should for going the way I did, it was more or less a knee-jerk decision. I may have noticed a couple of attractive girls in the Electronics Engineering department during orientation, I don't really recall... Despite this, I did fill some qualified electives with Computer Engineering and Computer Science courses. I had the standard one semester of C for my major, but then opted to take another semester of C, x86 Assembly, and a VHDL class. I recall dreaming up an imaginary stegosaurus friend named "Seggy Steggy" to help me debug assembly code because "error segmentation fault" officially became the most common string of words I've ever seen printed on a computer screen.

Then, after making it the better part of a decade in to my hardware career without coding much of anything, I learned this wonderful thing called Perl. I learned it because I was trying to automate a lot of the mundane out of my own job and possibly the jobs of my immediate colleagues. This was so successful that it blossomed in to automating a lot of other things outside of my own department, some data analytics, and a flurry of other random tasks. Now, much to my own delight, writing random Perl s‎crip‎ts has become a semi-regular part of my job.