The economy is still in dire straits, but I was lucky enough to find a job amidst it. However, I do not feel this organization has the possibility to take full advantage of my skills. It is a fine group of people who are all pretty top notch, but I am not satisfied with the amount of focus they have placed on technology. I'm looking for a company that can challenge me and help me grow while taking advantage of my ability to fully harness the power of the Internet and the computer to bring exciting, revolutionary products to market.

I've been involved with computers in some way since I was 10 years old. My first machine was a TRS-80. By the time I got it as a second-hand machine in 1985, finding software for it was already a challenge. In order to use it for anything other than word processing, I had to learn BASIC. I wrote several games and sound generators to amuse myself.

I eventually upgraded to an x86-based machine and learned to program using Pascal when I was 14. My first job was an internship for a local division of Morton International (did you know there are 13,000 different specific applications for salt?) repairing and maintaining between 80 and 120 desktop systems and implementing security policies on their Banyan VINES network. I was the first such intern to work there and apparently pioneered the internship program they later initiated with my high school.

I started my college career as a Mechanical Engineering student at UC Berkeley, but left the program after becoming disillusioned by the lack of hands-on opportunities available to undergraduate students.

All of this is the long way of saying that I am, to my core, a total geek. That I graduated with something other than a Bachelor of Science degree is something of a fluke. I had every intention of becoming a full-time newspaper reporter when I graduated, but my boss at AOL/Digital City had a different idea. She hired me to be their news editor but, after seeing that news was not much of a revenue generator and that my technical skills were fairly well developed, slashed the news part of the site and moved me into more of a production role. It snowballed from there.

The challenge presented to a newspaper journalist is the pressure of a daily deadline. I was often assigned a story between noon and 1pm each day and was asked for about 500 words on the story to be delivered to the editor by 4:30pm. This meant I had approximately three hours to research the story, call in interviews and actually write the story in a reasonably acceptable form. I take great pride in that fact that, not only did I rarely miss a deadline, my stories were rarely edited beyond finding the occasional typo or grammatical error. Sometimes the stories were changed because the editor decided to rewrite the story to present a certain point of view, but I was generally regarded as a reliable deadline writer.

Programming is similar in many ways. Often, a business team will dominate much of the planned schedule for a project with research and feature scoping, leaving relatively little time left to actually build the project on time. I'm morbidly aware of the affects of a missed deadline and, therefore, will do what I can to ensure I get everything in on time. I can keep my head together during a crunch and deliver code that is often better than merely acceptable.

As this is a general FAQ style interview, I can't address what skills are particularly pertinent to your specific company here. However, I bring a sense of enthusiasm wherever I go, which I try to maintain throughout my job. I also pride myself on my ability to adapt. One of my personal mottos is "Give me a book, two weeks and a project and I can learn anything." I'm not afraid of a challenge, even for something with which I have little or no experience. Provided I'm in an environment that allows me to concentrate on the subject at hand, I have the ability to throw myself into a project and begin producing not too long thereafter. This has proven to be a particularly useful skill in the fast-paced Internet/computer industry.

I have recently begun exploring the idea of building a web browsing application for the Pocket PC 2000, which has required me to dust off my nascent C/C++ skills. I'm actually quite surprised at how strong they are considering I have only "dabbled" in the languages, rather than working in them daily as I have with all of my other skills.

The goal for this project is to build what I consider to be an AvantGo killer. Rather than restrict users to a certain amount of bandwidth per month and forwarding web requests through proxy servers, I want to be able to allow Pocket PC users without a wireless service plan to download web pages onto their PDAs using their desktop's internet connection as a proxy. This way, users are only limited by the amount of memory they have available on their device and no massive support infrastructure would be required. To go along with this, I plan on building a site similar in structure to AvantGo that lists sites formatted for the PDA. There will be no cost to be listed, though I do plan on selling ads and feature placements.

I'm convinced that, with just some daily experience, my C/C++ skills can flourish, allowing me to build solid applications for the desktop and networking environments. As I work on my browsing project (I will probably use the IE browser, but will need to build some support code to make it work) I will post my progress in my code samples area. Considering that I'm doing this in my "spare" time, it may be a while.