Why

This month Andy Leonard (b/t) wants to know why we do what we do.

Matthew Broderick

When I was a kid, I watched War Games and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and immediately wanted to hack. I actually got in trouble for calling Sarah McLachlan's record label's BBS to try to hack. I had no idea it was a Canadian number! They look like American numbers.

But there I was, calling a BBS internationally. Sarah McLachlan's label is named Nettwerk so of course they have leet hacks going on there.

Prior to hacking because I dialed into a long distance BBS, I was playing Infocom games like Wishbringer on MS-DOS and pretending I was hacking. Then, Windows 95 came out and it was on! Me and my best friend Brandon were formatting, fdisking and reinstalling galore. We also called each other endlessly on Procomm Plus.

California

I went to school in Northern Louisiana and hated it. The curriculum was terrible and I could not get a job; one guy was even delighted when I failed his dumbass hardware test by missing one cable. So in 1997, I looked around the country for places that offered affordable broadband and I moved to California.

When I arrived in San Diego, I got the first job I applied for because the people I interviewed with weren't sexists. It was at an ISP and I had a blast! I started as tech support and was then promoted to webmaster, in charge of both Apache on FreeBSD and IIS on NT.

I remember having a conversation there, at Simply Internet. I asked which computer jobs were the most respected and made the most money, and someone told me Oracle. So I researched Oracle, hated the interface and bailed. My next job at a software startup needed a SQL Server DBA and I was so there for it 😎

What I love most about SQL Server is that it offers me the chance to do both administration and programming. Administration is cool because sysadmins are the leetest and programming is awesome because the possibilities are endless.

Working with SQL Server also pays pretty well but I do it all because I absolutely love it ❤