Growing Up Geek: Sean Ellis
(Alas, this picture from about 2003 is the earliest picture I have of myself - everything else is still at the bottom of my parent's closet.)
I've always been fascinated with technology; I can't remember a time when I wasn't messing around in the Windows Control Panel or making lights and motors do neat things or when I wasn't ripping apart things and trying to put things back together (and often failing). I've been told that when I was 3 or 4, my parents had to put a piece of cardboard in front of the family computer because I would always hit the reset or power button and cause lots of data loss and weird errors in DOS or Windows 3.1. And when I got my own computer, a Toshiba Satellite 200CDS, I was all over it doing everything from experimenting with the Windows 95 disk compression tool to giving mock lectures on how to use DOS.
The earliest thing I can remember wanting to be was an electrician, and so my parents bought me a few lights and sockets from Radio Shack and my dad would bring home junk pieces of electronics to tear apart and play with. We made a literal circuit board, which was a small sheet of plywood with terminal strips and wood screws to tie things down with and we learned just what LEDs do when you put too much power into them. Unfortunately, at the time my parents were pretty poor and while I had a couple books, they were the most basic books you could get and didn't really tell you how to do anything or tell you how to read schematics, something I now really wish I had learned back then.
When I got my first computer, my interests shifted. No longer did I have to obey the rules of the family computer; this was my own laptop that I could do whatever I wanted to with it. My interests in computers further solidified when one day, my father gave me an old copy of the A+ Certification manual. I read that entire book cover-to-cover, reading about everything from Pentium CPUs to dot-matrix printers. I read it so much and so often that the binding fell apart and I lost several sections out of it. Not too long after that, the Satellite I had developed a crack in the motherboard and no longer worked.
All was not lost, however. Soon after, I was given enough computers to fill the workshop we had behind our house at the time. Most of them my dad gave out to other people, but I was allowed to keep a few. Some worked, most didn't. I still enjoyed trying to make the non-working ones work or just looking at them and admiring how pretty they looked. As for the working ones, I set up one for myself as a personal computer and the others I experimented with Linux on. My dad had been given a copy of something called "Ubuntu" and I was given a complete boxed copy of SuSE Linux 9.3. Those Linux experiments ended up with one of my computers dying but that's a story for another time.
The most recent step was when I got into high school. I was told about a program called BEST Robotics where we could build a robot and compete with other schools playing a game. I had been doing some little programs in QuickBASIC and Visual Basic, I had just gotten a copy of C for Dummies and the team I was with needed a programmer. So why not? Ever since then, I've been enjoying writing code and that's where I've decided to go.
You could argue that I haven't completely grown up yet as I only just started college this year. However you define being grown up, I've had a lot of fun in years past developing my skills. I'm excited to have the chance to do something that I've enjoyed as a hobby for so many years as a profession. I can't wait to see what the future holds in store.
