I am the child, instilled with a sense of wonder about, well, everything. I got kind of a late start, didn't run into computers until I was starting High School, until my parents gave me an old Pentium II that they had lying around. I'm 19 now, so that would have been 2005-2006-ish. A horribly underpowered machine. I was infatuated. I installed WinXP on it for the first time, I laid awake at night listening to the hard drive wail... an 8GB hard drive. It barely fit XP on it. Over the next few years I did everything I could think of with that box to make it run just a little bit better. I scavenged my house's parts drawer, googling serial numbers on the silicon to see just what this board did, and whether it would make my relic run faster. A few months later, I upgraded my computer for the first time... A Pentium III! A 20 GB hard drive! My world had opened up. I had to have my old data and parts, so I became familiar with the internals of the computer. Eventually I ran out of things to do in windows. I tried the linux thing I had heard about, burned myself a liveCD of ubuntu, gutsy gibbon. Wifi didn't work on the cheap usb dongle I was using, so it was back to windows to me. But I had gotten a taste. A taste of the terminal, and of an operating system that actually let me tinker with things. When ubuntu fixed the wireless driver for that dongle, and I was ready to install it again (after a failed fedora install or 2). After that it was just one software foray after another. Something broke, and I adventured deeper into the file system to fix it. I started to learn how to program. I learned about Arch Linux. I got a Dual Core computer (!!). The rest is history.

I still learn all I can, but my focus has shifted a little. I'm learning to program properly, to make new tools instead of understanding existing ones. I'm learning C and python and haskell and lisp (and looking for more!) and loving every minute of it.

I find it a little bit disheartening, however, the lack of curiosity that my peers display, even my fellow CS majors. To me, the computer is a vastly complex system, just waiting to be explored, and thanks to open source software, I can! But a lot of my peers don't see things that way. I would hazard a guess that part of that reason is that the environment presented to them is not particularly interesting, particularly in a windows or mac environment, where a lot of the details are abstracted as far away as possible. For me the spark of curiosity was ignited when I had a relic of a machine that I needed to make run faster. I tried to squeeze the most out of that computer, and it taught me enough to whet my appetite. I feel like our youth, my peers have been and are being short changed by technology today. I'm not sure what there is to be done about it, but I know that it isn't right.